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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062809">Uncovered Call</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosecannon/pseuds/loosecannon'>loosecannon</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater'>sheepknitssweater</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Collateral [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M, Relationship Negotiation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:55:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>24,289</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062809</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosecannon/pseuds/loosecannon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepknitssweater/pseuds/sheepknitssweater</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Eddie gets a bathrobe, an apartment in LA, and a divorce. Richie gets figuratively vivisected, way too high, and a writing assignment.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beverly Marsh &amp; Richie Tozier, Bill Denbrough &amp; Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Collateral [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735957</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>182</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is a sequel to Collateral! it can probably stand alone, too, but makes more sense read after that.</p><p>an uncovered call is, according to SKS's friend who understands finance, "when you agree to sell a stock at a certain price but don’t own the stock." leaps of faith, etc.</p><p>homophobic slur used in a very very flippant/jokey way in this chapter</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Eddie</b>
</p><p>
  <span>Everyone at Eddie’s new job thought he had a dog. He did not—he had an Armani bathrobe. Richie dubbed it “Fuzzy” the first time he saw it and lost his mind every subsequent time that Eddie put it on. Eddie would cross the living room, and Richie would literally leap out of his seat, dropping whatever he was doing to exclaim, “Fuzzy Eds! Fuzzy Fuzzy! Here he comes: Fuzzy Eds!” The bathrobe </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> fuzzy—Eddie loved the way it felt against his skin, fluffy and warm and safe and big, soft in a way that he had never let himself indulge in before. Now, he looked forward to coming back to Richie’s from work, cranking up the A/C, stripping off his stiff, itchy clothes, and becoming Fuzzy. Richie would shriek, rub his hands up and down Eddie’s shoulders, and kiss him all over his face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was sort of a big deal that Eddie liked it when Richie lifted him into the air mid-hug, which he was only allowed to do when Eddie was wearing Fuzzy. Richie would set him down and flash a huge, ridiculous grin, and Eddie would say, “you’re so fucking cute,” and Richie wouldn’t even be allowed to say, “pot, kettle,” because the terms of Fuzzy-wearing were that Richie could think Eddie was cute in Fuzzy, and even behave as though Eddie was cute in Fuzzy, but he couldn’t actually say it. Instead, Richie would just snake his arms between Eddie’s waist and the bathrobe and say, “I’m so cold, you made it antarctic in here, you’ve gotta protect me from frostbite, like on </span>
  <em>
    <span>Naked and Afraid</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie called Eddie during his lunch break, when he was walking across the parking lot to his car. He said, “Eds, I’m so sorry,” and for a second Eddie thought something was seriously wrong, but then Richie continued, “I left Fuzzy on the floor, and now he has dust in his hair.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie leaned back against the hood of his car. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I let you wear him once, and this is what happens. Can’t believe it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know, okay, I know. But I borrowed him and then he slipped off. Wink, wink.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stop it,” Eddie said. “Stop. I refuse to think about Fuzzy that way.” And then, because he wanted to clarify that he was not going to fuck his dog, he said, “I am not going to think about the fuzzy bathrobe that way.” Nobody was around—he was sitting in his car now, in the empty parking lot, because he didn’t want anyone to hear him flirting and he didn’t like to feel exposed. This was, he knew, weird. He also couldn’t stand sitting in a chair with his back facing the awful vast world, where anyone could see what he was reading. He never even read anything suspicious.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he was a kid, he had a library copy of </span>
  <em>
    <span>Gray’s Anatomy</span>
  </em>
  <span> so overdue that it was essentially stolen, and he would read it inside another book, back to the wall, in a corner of his room. There was nothing particularly suspect about </span>
  <em>
    <span>Gray’s Anatomy</span>
  </em>
  <span>, in retrospect, but by that age he reflexively hid anything that might remind his mother that he had a body with processes, vulnerable to disease. Or that would let his mother know that </span>
  <em>
    <span>he</span>
  </em>
  <span> remembered, and, worse, that was thinking about it in new and interesting ways. By the time he was a teenager, he had forgotten this original purpose of hiding any weakness—he knew what his mother made him do was totally detached from any reality he could access, bodily or otherwise—and he just wanted to hide his body from himself. By the time he was a man, he’d mostly succeeded.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he was thirteen, before he faced the clown, he wrote a will. He left his music to Richie, along with his Walkman, which was his most treasured item. Bill got his Legos and model airplanes, Ben his Walkie-Talkies, and Mike his books, except for </span>
  <em>
    <span>Gray’s Anatomy</span>
  </em>
  <span>, which he decided to leave to Stan after determining that, out of the group, he most deserved to know where a clitoris was. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d broken open his piggy-bank, too, after filling it for eight years. It contained $102.65, which he was very impressed with. He left it all to Bev, because she needed it most and because he did not know what girls liked to receive in a will. He’d considered stealing some of his mom’s lipstick to leave her, too, but at twelve he was already on thin ice, suspected homosexuality-wise, so in the end he just left her the money and his posters, because she probably had to hide things behind them too. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was sitting there, on his bedroom floor, carefully stacking all his coins into dollar piles,when he realized he truly might die. This was not some adventure. This was real. He’d always thought he would die differently—in the worst part of the night, he thought AIDS—but that fear seemed thin and distant compared to the clown. It all did. The clown was easy, even refreshing, to fear, because it was easy to hate. Afterwards, Eddie had to go back to fearing people he loved instead. The difference was the difference between the pain of a broken arm and the pain of infection. His mother was a slow and steady wound, one he could neither see nor set. Whatever she had given him was blood-borne, hereditary, everywhere. He’d been afraid of Richie, too, back then, for what might be communicated between them—not the way he feared his mother, but sometimes it had felt close. Eddie’s mother pulled genetic rank, and Richie’s scraped-to-shit shoulder dripped rusty all over the well-kept upholstery of Eddie’s car. It was blood either way, inside Eddie either way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d left his childhood will with Richie, that summer, the coins and </span>
  <em>
    <span>Gray’s Anatomy</span>
  </em>
  <span> buried in the yard with a grim treasure map drawn on the will’s back—“X” marks the spot. Richie had not taken it seriously, which was what Eddie had needed from him, what he’d never gotten. Later, though, Richie would stroke Walkman with his fingertips, running them in gentle circles on the plastic and metal, and when they were grown, fighting It again, Richie told him, “No fucking way are you going to die. Remember that will you made?” And he looked past Eddie’s head, and then into his eyes for a freezing, aching second, and back past him, like he was in pain. Richie had loved him then—in childhood, and then when they returned. Maybe not like he did now, but he had.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie wasn’t the volatile unknowable Eddie’d thought he was then, and Eddie wasn’t afraid of him anymore. He got nervous before meetings, nodded off halfway through movies, and talked in his sleep. He cried easy, which he’d done when they were kids too, but before it had seemed to Eddie like an extension of Richie’s willingness to bleed, another way to prove that he could emit and emit without ever indicating anything real. But when Eddie had showed up at Richie’s after their horrible fight, he’d realized that wasn’t why emitted at all. Richie’d been unarmed and unarmored, then, totally naked. He hadn’t been crying to show off; he’d been crying because he’d meant it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie was like that more, these days—not just when he was broken-down (although Twitter still did a number on him), but when he laughed until he was hiccuping, and when he really talked to Eddie about how he felt, and in the mornings, and when he listened to music, and during sex. There was, as it turned out, a lot that Richie meant in total earnest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sometimes Eddie thought he liked it too much, seeing Richie defenseless. Nobody had ever trusted Eddie like that, and it was as intoxicating to see something no one else was allowed to as it had ever been. It was safe, too—that had always been the point of collateral, that it made Eddie safer. And Eddie’d been safe with Myra without ever really loving her at all. But the safety of really knowing someone was different from the safety of knowing they wouldn’t leave you—there was overlap, but there was also the irreducible fact that Eddie didn’t really want to see anyone but Richie (metaphorically) flayed alive. There were a lot of people who wouldn’t leave Eddie, but Eddie could leave, too—he’d proven that twice—and Richie was the person he didn’t want to leave. Eddie didn’t feel the faint comfort of being trapped now, but he didn’t feel the nauseous horror of it, either.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wondered what kind of person wanted to see their boyfriend flayed alive, so he said </span>
  <em>
    <span>metaphorically, metaphorically</span>
  </em>
  <span>, to himself a couple more times, even though it was obviously a metaphor. One morning, Eddie noticed Richie lying upside-down on the couch in his boxers, watching </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Sopranos </span>
  </em>
  <span>and yawning, and thought, very clearly, “I want to fuck his brains out.” Aside from being terribly cliche, this struck Eddie across the face with the image of Richie’s brain leaking out of his nose like a mummy, which left him both disgusted and terrified that he was on track to become a serial killer. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>After he drove to Richie’s from work that day, he asked Richie about it. If it was a truly crazy thought, Richie wouldn’t mind, and if it wasn’t, he might put it in a set.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Honestly,” Richie said, “if you obliterated part of my brain with your dick, that would be dope.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, it’s not possible.” Eddie cleared his throat. “So.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I dare you. Bet you a quarter. My soft palate is basically a trampoline. Lots of give back there.” Richie opened his mouth and prodded at the back of it with the tip of his tongue, the veiny underside blue and wet. “You wanna feel it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Richie, wait. Number one, I’m seriously asking: is that a serial-killer thought to have? Number two, I’m fucking soul-searching here. Now is not the time.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s a pretty normal thought, dude. I mean, it’s the logical next step after that particular turn of phrase, which is also normal to think about me.” He winked. “So, the real question is: do you wanna feel my soft palate? You wanna feel it with your fingers?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie raised a hand in protest. “Listen. I need a second,” he said, because he did not want to have serial killer thoughts and sex thoughts back-to-back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Whenever you’re ready. Just,” Richie wiggled his fingers in his mouth, shockingly deep, and removed them. “Get on in there.” Eddie laughed. </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Fuck it</span>
  </em>
  <span>, he decided. He was going to put his hand in Richie’s mouth and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Richie’d told him early on, “Seriously, any weird sex thing that crosses your mind, I would be down for,” and when Eddie had tried to argue against him with counterexamples Richie had just raised his eyebrows progressively higher until Eddie cracked and started laughing a little hysterically. Sometimes Richie shrugged or pulled back or looked pensive, and every time Eddie started panicking and wanted desperately to flee, but then Richie would give him a soft, open look, and Eddie realized it was fine. Once in awhile Eddie would go quiet and insane and Richie would ask him what was up and the answer Eddie returned was physically impossible, not to mention unpleasant-sounding, but Richie never acted like Eddie was crazy for wanting it. Sometimes he acted like Eddie was crazy for wanting it with </span>
  <em>
    <span>Richie</span>
  </em>
  <span>, but never like he was crazy for wanting it at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Anyway, Eddie assumed the soft palate issue was probably more of a body thing than a sex thing per se.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It turned into a sex thing pretty quick, though, so maybe he was incorrect. Afterwards, Richie said, “I think you did it. I think you dislodged some grey matter,” and grinned beatifically. So at least Richie wasn’t too worried that there was something very wrong with him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Richie</b>
</p><p>
  <span>Getting with Eddie did not magically cure Richie of being an asshole. It had more of an effect than it had the first time around, probably, and Richie was also starting at a baseline level of less-of-an-asshole than he’d been when he was 17, so it did make a pretty big dent. But, as it turned out, he was still an asshole, just less of one. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie’d just gotten back from the gym, and he was desperately rifling through Richie’s fridge for “anything with protein.” So far, he had found twelve kinds of hot sauce, four boxes of takeout rice, a half-full bottle of strawberry Pedialyte, and a vast quantity of Coronas. Richie was having a great time asking Eddie if food products that obviously didn’t have protein did. He’d gotten a pretty extreme response out of Eddie about horseradish, which Richie had claimed to believe contained ground-up chicken breast.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Richie, I think I’m entering catabolysis,” Eddie said. “So, joke’s on you, dude. That doesn’t even gross me out. I would eat that in a second.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” Richie said, having no idea what catabolysis was and accordingly no way to build on that bit. “What about—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Fucking finally,” Eddie exclaimed, pulling out a quart of yogurt that Richie had no memory of buying. He opened it and full-body recoiled, burying his face in his sleeve. “Ugh, Rich,” he said. “How long has this been in here?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s yogurt,” Richie said. “It doesn’t go bad.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie turned to squint at him incredulously. “Yogurt is a </span>
  <em>
    <span>dairy product</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” he said. “What do you think happens to dairy products?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Like, in general?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Eddie said, very gingerly lifting the container and walking over to the garbage can. “When you leave them in the fridge for—” he checked the expiration date— “three months.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Something bad?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Something very bad. It looks like a deep sea creature.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“An anemone?” Richie set up a truly terrible joke, because he was worried that Eddie would be genuinely thrust into a panic attack, and saying to his beautiful proud absolutely short boyfriend </span>
  <em>
    <span>are you going to have a panic attack</span>
  </em>
  <span> wasn’t something he had tried, yet. “Is it your enemy?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Rich.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is it an enema?”</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>“Richie! </span>
  </em>
  <span>Gross, I was just in your fridge. With the food.” He started washing his hands. Richie had never kept track of how long Eddie washed his hands for, but it couldn’t have been for this long. He looked like he was trying to scrub off the top layer of his skin, manually exfoliating with dish soap, and Richie remembered that, right, Eddie was weird about sex in probably the opposite direction from Richie, and was relatively new to gayness, or newly-returned. Richie didn’t know how long he had been digging himself into this particular hole, grossing Eddie out through stupid or lazy inaction. He had probably been doing it for way longer than the span of one anemone-enema pun.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie flicked the water off his hands and walked over to the island. “So, I’m seeing an apartment tomorrow,” he said. “You want to get dinner after? It’s in Brentwood.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie, already absorbed in rumination on the subject of how much he sucked, felt sort of like a trapdoor had opened under him, from one basement to another, deeper basement. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Richie? Hello?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, hey,” Richie said. “Yup. Sure. Sounds good.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie’s eyebrows dropped. “What’s wrong?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Huh?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You look weird.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m weird-looking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, literally, you are grimacing.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie tried to pull a big grin, but apparently he failed, because Eddie said, “You are still doing it. With your eyes.” So, realistically, Richie probably looked like the Joker. He tried to unfurrow his eyebrows, but from the worried face Eddie made, the effect was not pleasant.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, no, I’m totally fine. We’re talking about apartments, not enemas. So you,” he said, and then paused. Eddie wasn’t particularly normal in his expectations of cleanliness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So I what?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t want to move in so soon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, yes, I don’t want to move in so soon,” Eddie said slowly. “That’s why I’m getting an apartment.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay. Cool! Um. It’s just. Uh.” He put his elbows on the island and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry I’m gross?” he tried. He sounded totally abject, obviously. Also, he should not have phrased that like a question—he sounded like Cher from Clueless, and he did not know how the state of California factored into a yogurt/real estate related ass-eating conversation, but probably not well. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie walked toward him, arms outstretched, in befuddled slow-mo. “It’s fine? I mean, it’s your fridge. Just clean it.” Which indicated that Richie had not been successfully communicating that he was talking about sex, which was a first. It wasn’t that Richie had a problem talking about his butthole, obviously, but now he was stumbling over how to talk about the emotional and psychological </span>
  <em>
    <span>significance</span>
  </em>
  <span> of his butthole. He didn’t know how to say </span>
  <em>
    <span>what does my anus represent, childhood trauma-wise? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Or </span>
  <em>
    <span>are you moving out because you hate eating ass, and won’t tell me? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Or </span>
  <em>
    <span>am I too forward about sex? </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you don’t want to do it, we don’t have to.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you talking about moving in together? Or—dating at all? Or what?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, um,” Richie said. “Rimming?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>What?</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just, like,” Richie said. “If it freaks you out—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What the </span>
  <em>
    <span>fuck </span>
  </em>
  <span>are you talking about, Richie?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If mold on yogurt bothers  you that much, I’m assuming. Like.” He really didn’t want to imply that there was, for example, mold on his butthole, or anything on his butthole, but he needed to convey that he wouldn’t have any problem with it if Eddie didn’t want to put his face any closer to it than the yogurt-anemone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That—what the fuck,” Eddie said, slowly turning red. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Why</span>
  </em>
  <span> are you—what connection could this possibly have to that?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just, like, my apartment’s gross,” Richie said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Richie,” Eddie said, bright red, “your shit is not a factor in me wanting to sublet an apartment.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You could be talking about, like, three different things when you say that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie leaned against the pantry door and started massaging his temples. “Okay, well,” he said, and switched to ticking items off on his fingers. “I don’t hate your apartment, even if you leave yogurt in your fridge. I don’t secretly resent eating your ass. I don’t think you’re a bad person, if that’s what you’re asking. Does that cover everything?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You care about the yogurt, though.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The yogurt, your ass, your personality, and my apartment are all </span>
  <em>
    <span>so</span>
  </em>
  <span> different. I really don’t know how you made the conceptual leap from one to the other. No random four nouns are less related.” Eddie had just looked baffled and a little annoyed, but now he was starting to look wary. “Are you—upset I’m moving out?” he asked. His voice was beginning to take on the reedy quality it got when he was forcing himself to say something. “I’ve never lived alone. And I don’t—you know. I need to have somewhere else to go.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No!” Richie exclaimed. “No, no, I’m not upset you're moving out at all. Eds, seriously.” When he backed up and considered it with anything approaching objectivity, Richie knew this was true. Not only was he not mad, which had never been on the table, but, practically speaking, the idea of Eddie being stuck in Richie’s apartment all the time with no alternative was actually totally nauseating to Richie, no matter how amazing the past few weeks of having Eddie around all the time had been. It had been over a decade since he’d lived with someone else, over two since he’d lived with someone he felt any kind of responsibility to. He’d wanted to impress his old roommates, but never in ways that his abject daily routine was actually at odds with. He knew he was going to stop waking up when Eddie did eventually, and then, even if Eddie wasn’t highly disturbed by Richie’s habits, which he would be, Richie would still have to go around wondering if he was. Even considering it made Richie feel like his brain was going to explode.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Why was he freaking out about it, then? Because he was an asshole, and seeing Eddie recoil from something about him scared the shit out of him. But acting like the shit had been scared out of him was really, really fucked up, because Eddie had several lifetimes’ worth of being trapped. He didn’t need Richie getting in on it, too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m so sorry,” Richie said. “I didn’t mean it like that, but that’s totally what it sounded like. That I was, like, trying to lock you down.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It didn’t really,” Eddie said. “I just, I don’t know.” He walked back to the island and sat next to Richie, propping an elbow on the counter to lean his forehead against his hand. “It’s just seriously, seriously not about you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Got it,” Richie said. “Also, even if it was about me, that would be fine. Like, if you ever want to leave at all, please do it. Even if it’s because of my moldy yogurt.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, I don’t want to. But I’ll keep that in mind.” Eddie lifted his head to raise his eyebrows at Richie then. “Why were you talking about rimming, again?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh. Well.” Richie desperately wanted to collapse onto his back, or at least slouch a little, but because he was on a barstool he had nowhere to flop. “I genuinely thought the yogurt was a metaphor for my ass,” he said, staring at Eddie’s solar plexus. “Like, I was actually just being that stupid.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie looked at him incredulously. “You thought I was moving out so I could minimize contact with your ass?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not general contact,” Richie said. “Mouth contact.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah, I got that,” Eddie said. “Well, not everything is about your ass. There aren’t that many things in the world that </span>
  <em>
    <span>are </span>
  </em>
  <span>about your ass.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ouch.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look, I also wish more things in the world were about your ass.” Eddie said. He cleared his throat. “Including mouth contact. Actually, uh. Especially.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie sort of felt like he’d just run into a wall. “Really?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How was that not obvious?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t see your face back there,” Richie said. “You could just be popping a Viagra five minutes before. Going through the motions.” As Richie said this, he realized pulling back by a very small distance and growling “hold still, Rich” like he was in </span>
  <em>
    <span>Braveheart</span>
  </em>
  <span> and had just charged into battle was probably not a part of anyone’s set of calculated motions, even Eddie’s, who was admittedly pretty weird. Eddie didn’t say that, but he did give Richie a meaningful, faintly reddish look, which probably meant something to that effect. “Okay!” Richie said, throwing his hands up in surrender. “Okay, you love my ass! I believe you!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good. I don’t know what else I could do to convince you.” Richie winked theatrically. “Nope,” Eddie said. “Not happening. My stomach is digesting itself right now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It </span>
  <em>
    <span>is</span>
  </em>
  <span> called </span>
  <em>
    <span>eating</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Richie said. “There’s probably some nutritional content.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie shuddered. “Okay, I draw the line there. God, that’s fucking awful.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m trying to help you,” Richie said. “Also, there might be some peanut butter on the second shelf.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lo and behold, there was peanut butter on the second shelf. Eddie started eating it with a spoon, even though there were already obvious spoon-marks in it. This meant either that he was truly starving to death or that he was not, in fact, profoundly disgusted by Richie’s body and the traces it left. “Hey, thanks,” he said, sitting next to Richie again. “You saved my life there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just returning the favor.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Cute,” Eddie said, and reached up to muss Richie’s hair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Pot, kettle.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey,” Eddie said. He kicked Richie on the shin, then kissed him on the cheek, then passed him the jar and spoon. Then he asked, “You write today?”, because he was a sadist.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Richie pointed at him with the spoon. “Party foul,” he said. “Complete and utter party foul.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m just saying, we had a pretty funny conversation just then,” Eddie said. “It wasn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>fun</span>
  </em>
  <span>, but think about it. Kind of hilarious.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You want me to put that in my set?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Eddie said. “If you do that, I will kill you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So you’re just dangling potential jokes over my head?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m just telling you that you do lots of funny things,” Eddie said. “You could write about Somewhere Soft and Safe and Without Faggots.” This is what Eddie had once drunkenly slipped up and called Richie’s favorite Neutral Milk Hotel shirt, and it was so hysterically funny to both of them that it had stuck. It was even funnier because Eddie, having been straight for twenty years, instinctively lowered his voice when he said </span>
  <em>
    <span>faggot</span>
  </em>
  <span>. There was nothing like watching the man you loved, whose mouth your dick had just been in, blushing while making a joke about a shirt that really wasn’t homophobic at all, just bizarre.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That isn’t me being funny, though,” Richie said. “That’s you being funny.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Luckily, I’m only funny in front of you. No one would suspect it was me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That is definitely not true.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How would you know? You don’t see me interacting with other people when you’re not there,” Eddie said. “I’m very severe.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re pretty fucking severe with me, too,” Richie said. “It makes you even funnier.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Eddie rolled his eyes. “Well,” he said, “only one of us has to write a set. And you’ve definitely made enough jokes over the course of your life to fill an hour.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe, but I don’t remember any of them,” Richie said. “I have no idea what comes out of my mouth at any time.” Eddie looked kind of thoughtful. “Wait, are you planning a sex thing?” Richie asked. “You look like you’re planning a sex thing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I am not planning a sex thing,” Eddie said. Richie was about to press him on it, but then he reached over and squeezed Richie’s knee—not as a sex thing per se, but maybe kind of as a love thing—and Richie couldn’t really do anything but make the stupidest face of his life and watch Eddie take tiny bites of peanut butter like some kind of freakish, beautiful opposable-thumbed chinchilla.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>gets explicit in this one, a couple details about kink (which is pretty mild but present) in the endnote</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Richie</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next time Richie FaceTimed Steve, he fucked up. He was sitting in the living room, the way he always did, but one of Eddie’s pajama shirts was hanging off the back of the couch next to him. The second Steve picked up, his eyes widened, and he took a deep breath. “Rich,” he said, “I didn’t bring it up earlier, because you were having a hard time.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Huh?” Richie said, still unaware of the pajama situation. “What’s it? What hard time?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Who was that man in your apartment? And—actually, this is a lot more important—is he </span>
  <em>
    <span>still there</span>
  </em>
  <span>?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Which man?” Richie said, which was stupid and made little sense. He should have said </span>
  <em>
    <span>my brother</span>
  </em>
  <span> or something.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Which man—” Steve’s eyes widened in horror. “Wait, are there </span>
  <em>
    <span>multiple?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No! Jesus, no. Come on, Steve.” He looked around frantically, finally spotting the shirt. “This is my shirt! It’s not a guy at my orgy’s shirt.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, it is not,” Steve said. “Do not bullshit me right now. You have never worn pajamas in your life.” Richie didn’t have any convincing response to that, and Steve added, “You know the rule.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The rule was that Richie had to tell Steve every time he slept with anyone, so that Steve could do damage control if need be and because Richie had, as Steve said,</span>
  <em>
    <span> lost his secret boyfriend privileges.</span>
  </em>
  <span> Steve had revoked these privileges over brunch in West Hollywood, at the place they used to go before Richie started getting recognized, after Richie fled a SNL audition and the city of New York altogether because of a secret boyfriend. Secret fling, really, but it had gone south when Richie had ghosted said secret fling, who happened to be a pathologically ambitious and mastermindy SNL writer who had subsequently turned the entire east coast against Richie for a good three years. Richie, meanwhile, had blown his nose into the tablecloth and made everyone at the restaurant wonder why Steve, friendly gayborhood guy and family man, was screaming at a weeping, stoned heterosexual covered head-to-toe in purpling bite marks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No entry?” Richie asked. This was how Steve had explained it: </span>
  <em>
    <span>you have to tell me BEFORE the point of entry. I don’t care when or how, but you need to call me BEFORE ENTRY. </span>
  </em>
  <span>He said </span>
  <em>
    <span>entry</span>
  </em>
  <span> something like twenty times. “I didn’t think it was in effect anymore, man. I’m out now. What, you’re gonna make the guy sign an NDA?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, you’re right. Nobody could possibly have anything else on you, Rich. You never do anything illegal.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you talking about killing a guy or about the $4000 worth of ketamine in my apartment? Because that’s a pretty normal amount for a man my age.” Steve was sputtering with rage. Richie figured that maybe this wasn’t a great time for a joke. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding, obviously. I don’t have ketamine in my apartment.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t lie to me right now, okay? Not in general, and not right now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fine, fuck. I have somewhere between nada and $4000 worth of ketamine. Ballpark, $200. Which is reasonable.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You know what a normal amount of ketamine for a 40-year-old man is? None. Zero. No ketamine for at least 15 years.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie did not call Steve a humorless bitch, but he did think it. He decided that it would probably be a bad idea, considering how much shit of his shit Steve dealt with on a daily basis, and how much of a humorless bitch he was. Also, rumors tore through managers faster than pre-teen girls, and Richie wasn’t sure if anyone else would take him, given the number of lawyers that needed to be involved in his day-to-day activities. Instead, he said “I have the maturity level of a 25-year-old, though.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Steve said, “because of the </span>
  <em>
    <span>ketamine.</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh my god, I’m not on ketamine right </span>
  <em>
    <span>now.” </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wait. Wait, Rich, are you in love?” Steve looked deadly serious, like Richie being in love was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. Given Steve’s past experience, Richie figured that was a fair assumption. He did not say </span>
  <em>
    <span>it’s different, this time,</span>
  </em>
  <span> because Steve would have absolutely no patience for that. Instead, he said, “maybe I have a crush, okay, but there has been no entry.” This had not been a lie when he’d FaceTimed Steve in October, he rationalized.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Steve said, “I wish you would say things in a less disgusting way,” even though he was the one who came up with entry!, and looked at Richie pityingly, like Richie was a sad stupid dog Steve had agreed to pet-sit and couldn’t quite fit a thundershirt on. Then he added, “What kind of person leaves his shirt in the living room of someone who has a crush on him?”, almost sympathetically.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie was struck by the urge to defend Eddie, but he managed to suppress it. “Uh, I don’t know,” Richie said. “Gotta g—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wait,” Steve said. “Rich, hold on. You’re writing, right?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Uh,” Richie said. “I mean.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re not writing.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m not </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>writing. I’m definitely thinking.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, no,” Steve said. “That is not good, Rich.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s fine!” Richie said. “It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m serious. I’m, uh. I’m working on it. But I really have to go now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You </span>
  <em>
    <span>have</span>
  </em>
  <span> to go.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Richie said. “I, uh. I’m seeing my brother?” And he hung up before Steve could remind him that he didn’t have a brother.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Actually, Eddie was coming over. Richie realized belatedly that he probably should’ve put on pants, so they could go somewhere for lunch and shit, but he figured the excruciating conversation he’d just had was an okay excuse. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie let himself in. Richie tried to figure out, based on Eddie’s outfit, whether Eddie thought they were going out to lunch or not. It was kind of hard to tell, because Eddie was pretty much always either wearing Fuzzy, wearing a suit, naked, or dressed like they were going out to lunch. He’d gotten new sneakers, dark green suede, which made it even more difficult to tell, because they, like most reasonably gay items of clothing, were of indeterminate dressiness. Today Eddie was wearing a henley—he was always wearing shirts that didn’t button or zip all the way down—chinos, and the new sneakers. Richie got sidetracked from figuring out if they were going to lunch by how unfathomably cute he was.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, Rich,” Eddie said, walking over. He leaned over to kiss Richie, then pulled back suddenly and pointed at him. “You have a better frying pan than I do,” he said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie had no way of knowing whether this was true and even less of a sense of why it would matter. “Uh, okay,” he said. “I win?” Eddie was walking into the kitchen now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Where is it?” Now he was rifling around in the fridge. Richie could see him checking the expiration date on the carton of eggs before he pulled it out. He turned to look at Richie. “Where’s your frying pan?” he repeated.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What’s going on?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m making eggs.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie leaned over the armrest to get a closer look at what Eddie was doing. What he was doing was whipping through all of Richie’s cabinets at breakneck speed. Also, his butt looked insanely good. “It’s—yeah, you got it,” Richie said, as Eddie pulled the frying pan out with a clatter. “But, babe, seriously. I can make you eggs, dude.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m trying to </span>
  <em>
    <span>learn</span>
  </em>
  <span> how to make eggs. I am a grown man, I should be able to make eggs. Also, did you just call me ‘babe’ and ‘dude’ in the same sentence?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Nope. You heard wrong. I called you </span>
  <b>‘</b>
  <span>bathe’ and ‘dude’ because I want you to bathe, dude.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Uncalled for, and untrue,” Eddie said. “That was kind of funny, also. You could put that in a set. Something about rural Maine repression.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I already only have jokes about rural Maine repression. Maine repression is not that funny. There’s no punchline. </span>
  <em>
    <span>And then I left! </span>
  </em>
  <span>is not a punchline.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, but maybe you can draw on it later.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie typed into a note, “</span>
  <em>
    <span>babe, dude, same sentence</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” He looked at it and deleted it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie shrieked from the kitchen, then said “fuck” something like nine times in a row. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie put down his iPad and rushed into the kitchen. “You okay?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yep.” Eddie was standing a yard away from a sputtering pan shooting hot oil several feet in the air. He was frantically brushing at his forearms, which were already speckled with reddening burns. Richie ducked and went to turn off the stove at a half-crouch, but it was already off. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How high did you turn on the flame?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Higher than it should have been, obviously,” he grumbled. “All the way. I figured—never mind, obviously it was dumb.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The more fire, the quicker the eggs?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I was hungry!” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, well, I’m totally failing to write any jokes, so if you wanna write some jokes for me and I make eggs, I’d be down.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Dude—actually, babe—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Ha, ha. Listen, let me make you an omelet. I need to do something right, like, right now.” He did. He really wanted Eddie to devour his food and look at him like a kid watching magic tricks. Also, he wanted Eddie to crowd him against the island and tell him he was </span>
  <em>
    <span>really </span>
  </em>
  <span>good at making omelets, but that wasn’t even his most impressive skill; his most impressive skill was sucking dick. This was a nice idea partly because, in this fantasy universe, Eddie would not be listing “smart” or “funny” under Richie’s impressive skills, which, in practice, he usually did, like he was worried Richie’s self-image was going to get fucked up otherwise. In this fantasy universe, Richie was required to be neither smart nor funny, and all he had to do all day was make okay omelets and suck dick. Those were the only areas where Richie’s skills had consistent returns, after all.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Richie,” Eddie said, stepping back up to the stove, “I’m going to eat these.” He looked at the eggs, rubbery and greyish, and then back at Richie, like he was daring him to say something.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie held up his hands. “Listen,” he said, “you want an omelet, you know where to find me,” and he returned to the living room, where his iPad on the coffee table practically hummed with its reminder of his failures. He had about thirty seconds to feel really sorry for himself before Eddie plunked down next to him, holding the plate of truly horrible eggs aloft. He swung his legs across Richie’s lap, shoveled a huge forkful of eggs into his mouth, visibly gagged, and swallowed. How any one person could be so weird remained a mystery to Richie.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Eds,” Richie said, “you sure—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m fucking sure,” Eddie snapped, and ate another forkful.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie watched him eat for awhile. He kept wincing and then persevering. Richie encircled his ankle with his hand—he could fit it all the way around, which Eddie usually turned bright red over, but he was too distracted to notice right now. He rubbed some calf hair back and forth with his thumb. “Why is it that everyone who comes out of the closet when they’re 40 either cooks like a lesbian or can’t make eggs that don’t look like dragon diarrhea?” Richie asked. Richie knew why he cooked like a lesbian: it was because he had learned to cook from the group of punk lesbians who’d seen a few of his early sets and realized that he was on the brink of several kinds of death, among them starvation and sex-murder. Now, he only knew how to make morning-after brunch and vaguely pan-Asian dinner, instinctively preferred brown rice to white rice, and had to supplement all the food he cooked with beef jerky, since he still had no idea what to do with actual meat.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Stop ruining my food,” Eddie said, then gingerly spat out what appeared to be a flake of cast iron. Richie very generously didn’t comment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You know, there was this woman, Tiff?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie waited for some explanation of who the fuck Tiff might have been, but there was none forthcoming. “Yeah?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“She heard one of my sets, when I was nineteen, about getting cougared, and she was like ‘who the fuck is this suicidally dumb infant’ and was really insanely nice to me—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie seemed to finally get what it might have meant to get ‘cougared’ as Richie Tozier, which Richie’d thought would be fine, but he looked deeply, deeply sad. “How old was the guy?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie did not want to get into the time he hooked up with a funeral home owner from South Pasadena who had a gun on him and would have definitely killed Richie if he realized Richie knew where he lived, so he said, “Okay, that isn’t really the point of the story. The guy didn’t have a pink mohawk, Tiff did.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Is the point of the story that you knew someone with a pink mohawk?” Eddie said, like he was drowning in friends with pink mohawks and wished richie would stop milking his one countercultural friend for coolness-points. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, the point of this story is that—you know, there really is no point to this story. I guess I was trying to bare my soul to you, darling, and instead all I got was contempt.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, okay, continue.” Eddie took another bite of horrible looking eggs and appeared to play around with their alien texture in his mouth before swallowing. It looked like he almost enjoyed it, which was truly alarming in its own right.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Too late, you missed the window. Now I will never be emotional again. No longer will tabloids say ‘RICH TOZIER IS EMOTIONAL. Now they will say ‘RICH TOZIER IS A MAN OF STONE.’” Eddie made a little noise, a half-laugh, which Richie recognized as the sound of Edward Kaspbrak suppressing a dick joke. It was one of the most delightful sounds in Richie’s head. Even better than music or sex noises or Hungarian chefs trying desperately to explain things to him was Eddie thinking of a very juvenile joke and not saying it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie stole a bite of Eddie’s eggs with his fingers, because they really could not get any grosser no matter what you did to them. It was awful. Somehow, despite the rubbery chalk-yellow nature of the threads of yolk running through them, there remained snotty uncooked whites. Richie had not seen this coming, and winced, playing it up by scrunching the corners of his lips down to his jaw. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up,” Eddie said, like that was normal. Like your average guy talked like a Little League announcer abruptly transported from the Dust Bowl. “Anyway, rich, have you eaten today?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie had not. Well, that wasn't completely true—he’d sort of grazed on various snacks, but he had not had anything resembling a lunch. He was still not accustomed to waking up early enough to make any sort of actual meal pre-4 pm, and he had eaten a handful of corn chips, some celery, slices of pepperjack, and olives with his fingers. “It’s complicated,” he said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How complicated can it be? It’s sort of yes-or-no.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, it’s very complicated. It’s the sort of thing that is both a yes and a no. Kinda like us, when we were kids.” That was a wrong move. Eddie looked kind of heartbroken again, but sort of glad for it too, like a good 30% heartbreak felt nice. It was reassuring. Eddie was so different from him in a lot of ways, and that was good, but it was always a bit of a relief to know that Eddie, too, liked breaking his own heart, just slightly, and putting it back together. It made the fact that he was with Richie a little less incomprehensible.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not like us now, though,” Eddie said. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie folded over to try to kiss him, but Eddie’s legs were too much on his lap, and he didn't want to dislodge them. He got a mouthful of cotton and elbow for his efforts. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We are a yes,” Eddie clarified. “That wasn’t my weird way of breaking up with you, it was a yes. So, like, fuck who we were when we were 18.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Richie said. “Fuck those guys.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What were they thinking? I mean, Christ.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Nothing good on my end, I can assure you. Only about your dick and mean things to say to people. That was it. Dick, mean things.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie didn't say that that was basically all richie thought about now, which was very nice of him. Instead, he said, “you have to not say a gross joke version of ‘I told you so’ when I say what I’m about to say.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve pretty much never told anyone I told them so,” Richie said. “I am almost never right.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, well, can you show me how to cook something?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Seriously?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Eddie said, “I just very embarrassingly asked you to show me how to cook something as a joke.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Of course I’ll show you how to cook something,” Richie said. “Can’t promise it’ll make any sense, though.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It can’t be that hard,” Eddie said, swinging his legs off Richie’s lap.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For the next twenty minutes, Eddie kept trying to write the steps of what Richie was doing to make stir-fry down on his phone. This really didn’t work, because there were no steps to Richie’s process. Every moment of cooking, for Richie, was spent doing something he’d forgotten to do at an earlier point. At one point, he accidentally started putting A1 in the pan instead of soy sauce, and was only saved from steak-flavored green beans by Eddie noticing and exclaiming “Richie! Richie! Stop!”, like they were 14 and Richie was about to light a cigarette backwards, which he used to do all the time by genuine accident. He actually still did it sometimes, but at this point he was chewing so much nicotine gum that an actual cigarette was a treasured experience of which he savored every second. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t think I learned anything from that,” Eddie said, leaning against the island.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, you cut the broccoli,” Richi said. “That’s something.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t humor me,” Eddie said, and took a bite of the stir fry. He glared at Richie. “How is this so good? What the fuck?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie thought about telling Steve, “There hasn’t just been ass entry, there has been </span>
  <em>
    <span>soul</span>
  </em>
  <span> entry, and this guy has shit on me way beyond killing a guy </span>
  <em>
    <span>or </span>
  </em>
  <span>ketamine.” It didn’t sound pleasant, but it also didn’t sound totally terrible. “I don’t know,” he said. “Lesbian magic.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You still talk to her?” Eddie asked.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Tiff, you mean? Definitely not,” Richie said. “Everyone was pretty pissed when I sold out. Like, the weirdly closety kid you’re letting crash at your apartment is only cute until his closetiness becomes contagious.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You aren’t contagious, Rich,” Eddie said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You say the nicest things to me.” It came out a little more earnest than it should have, maybe because Eddie not thinking he was contagious was a relatively recent development, by all accounts. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I fucking mean it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, I know I’m not contagious.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I know you know you’re not contagious,” Eddie said, then took a bite, then looked a little contrite. “Sorry. That wasn’t very romantic.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, coming from you, it’s—actually, yeah, it’s not very romantic,” Richie said. “Kind of bitchy, honestly.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fuck you,” Eddie said, then, “I’ll chop the vegetables, next time.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Knock yourself out,” Richie said.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <b>Eddie</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie woke up and immediately coughed up a wad of mucus roughly the size of a ping pong ball. Luckily, he was in his own bed, so he didn’t hack it onto Richie’s chest or back; it just landed wetly on Eddie’s pajama shirt. “God dammit,” he said aloud, and then coughed more.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He dragged himself to the bathroom, where he took his temperature. His stomach and head felt okay, and he still had his voice. But he had a low fever, and every time he tried to speak, he exploded into a damp coughing fit. He also couldn’t stop sneezing. Great.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>First, he called his boss. He hadn’t been in this job long enough for his neuroticism to become widely understood, which was a really good thing. In New York, everyone gave him a wide berth at least two weeks afterward every time he took a sick day, because any concrete indication of frailty took his very bad resting mood to worse every time. Realistically, the same thing was probably going to happen now, but it felt a lot better to know no one was bracing themselves for it. Except Richie, probably, because Richie remembered.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When Eddie had missed class in middle school, it had been because his mother had told him he had to, and he’d believed her. When he’d missed class in high school, it had been because his mother had told him he had to, and he hadn’t believed her, but it was amazing how little difference that made. Usually he wasn’t even sick—he’d just come home too late or left too early, or given her an attitude, or it was something else that Eddie couldn’t trace to any logic at all. It worked, though, logic or no. If he got in his car, she’d stand at the front window and watch him as she dialed the school on their landline, ready to tell them that he had mononucleosis and would remain a danger to other students for the next several months if he turned the key in the ignition. So he never did turn the key in the ignition; he always went back inside and stayed in his room all day, listening to music in his headphone so loud it made his ears ring, until it was time for him to sneak out for cross-country practice, as long as his mother had fallen asleep by then. Technically, you weren’t supposed to show up for practice if you’d been absent, but Eddie’s coach had some idea of what was going on—he never asked, which was why Eddie loved cross country, but he seemed to understand—and he never punished Eddie for it, or even mentioned it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie used to bike over to Eddie’s in the dark those nights and pelt his window with projectiles of varying sizes until Eddie let him in. “Hey, truant!” Richie would stage-whisper, which made Eddie feel like he was fucked up in the normal way of a sixteen-year-old boy and not in the abnormal way of his real self, so he loved it. Way before they’d ever kissed, they used to lie next to each other on Eddie’s bed, Richie recounting the events of the day (excluding class material, of course) while Eddie tried not to laugh and laughed anyway. Even when he actually was sick, Richie always came over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie tried and failed to fall back asleep. Eventually, he gave up and called Richie. He picked up after a lot of rings, squinting at the camera and propping his head up with his arm, the pale underside bluish in the morning light. His pillow and sheet were both in the frame. “Hey, babe,” he said on a yawn.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie felt an irrational swell of anger that he had to look at Richie without being able to touch him, then felt both crazy and evil for it. “Hi,” he said. He tried not to cough, but, of course, it didn’t really work. He should’ve just texted, but Richie was the only person who’d ever made him feel better when his body was failing him, and he’d wanted so badly to feel better. Alone in his almost-empty apartment with a rent as high as his mortgage had been, his sink with none of Richie’s stubble clogging the drain and his fridge with nothing rotting in it, he felt terrible.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You okay?” Richie asked. “Did you just take a massive bong rip, or are you sick?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I took a massive bong rip,” Eddie said. “I’m staying home from work so I can be stoned in peace all day. I can’t come over, either. Because of the bong rip.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Shit, dude,” Richie said, wincing. “I’m sorry. You want me to bring anything? Uh… soup?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m fucking fine,” Eddie snapped.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, okay,” Richie said. “Damn.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sorry,” Eddie said. “I’m such a dick when I’m sick. Jesus.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I mean, I get it,” Richie said. “Being sick sucks.” He did not say, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I know your psychological wreckage is the reason you don’t want me to bring you soup like any normal person would want his boyfriend to</span>
  </em>
  <span>, but Eddie figured it was implied. “You know, I can come over and be a totally unhelpful shit, too. I can knock everything off your shelves like a cat and tell you the plots of bad </span>
  <em>
    <span>Simpsons</span>
  </em>
  <span> episodes until your skull explodes, if that appeals at all.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was—exactly what Eddie needed to hear, actually. “Nope,” he said. “Thanks for offering to torture me, though.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s my specialty.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie laughed. “No, I can think of some others,” he said, which, unfortunately, had the effect of turning him on a little. This was a problem.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie laughed. “That’s just mean.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, well, I didn’t think it through.” Eddie briefly weighed his options, then realized he was truly insane. “I’m not gonna have phone sex at 9 am, 24 hours after I last saw you, coughing every time I try to talk,” he decided. “I don’t like what that would say about me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It would just say that you’ve got a smoking hot bee eff,” Richie said, and positioned the camera to give a close-up of his armpit, apparently thinking this was amusingly gross instead of what it actually was, that being unconscionably sexy. “And that you’re a good-time gal.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m a good-time gal? Me?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Richie said. “You’re easy.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m pretty difficult, actually,” Eddie said. “I just got mad when you offered to bring me soup.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I stand corrected. You’re really, really hard. So hard.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, fuck you,” Eddie said. “Seriously, fuck you. I’m going back to sleep.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Alright, alright,” Richie said. “Keep me posted, if you want.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll let you know if I asphyxiate on my snot and die.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Thanks, babe.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure,” Eddie said, and hung up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This time, he did manage to fall back asleep. He spent the rest of the morning drifting in and out of consciousness, watching </span>
  <em>
    <span>Naked and Afraid </span>
  </em>
  <span>on YouTube—he didn’t have cable—and eventually eating a disgusting pre-made salad, which Richie had mocked him in the checkout lane at Whole Foods for buying, for lunch. After that, he migrated to the living room. He had some very bitchy thoughts about how he’d stupidly left Fuzzy at Richie’s and now didn’t even have the comfort of his bathrobe in this time of duress. At the time, leaving Fuzzy at Richie’s had seemed like a sweeping gesture of romance and commitment. Now it seemed like an incredibly dumb lapse in judgment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie reminded himself that he could just ask Richie to bring it over and he would, no questions asked. Then he had some thoughts about what this would mean about his own relative helplessness, which pretty much put the nail in the coffin of him wearing Fuzzy at any point in the next day. He sighed and made a cup of tea.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He didn’t hear much from Richie, which was good, because he really didn’t want to snap at him again, but bad, because, compared to talking to Richie, there wasn’t much of anything that took the edge off his physical (and mental, and emotional) fragility. That evening, he’d been driven to the point of answering emails he wasn’t technically supposed to be answering when he got a text from Richie.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <b>wrge we supposed to talk to Bill and everyone?</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie breathed in steam from his mug, feeling like there was a cork in each of his nostrils. He checked the time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Yep, in ten minutes</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>oh no</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>im too fuckign high right now this is ognna be sooo bad</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie tried to call Richie, but he didn’t pick up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Dude, are you okay?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>yea i just cant rly talk much</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I don’t think they’ll be upset/particularly surprised that you’re high</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>What happened?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>I DONT KNOW ITS THESE COLORADO GUMMY BUBs</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>What is a gummy bub?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie opened a Chrome window and entered, </span>
  <em>
    <span>gummy bub</span>
  </em>
  <span>, to no results. He typed </span>
  <em>
    <span>Colorado THC gummy bub laced</span>
  </em>
  <span> and didn’t get any results for that, either. Then he tried </span>
  <em>
    <span>Colorado THC gummy bub PCP</span>
  </em>
  <span> and </span>
  <em>
    <span>Colorado THC gummy bub fentanyl</span>
  </em>
  <span>—no results. Then he felt a little silly.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <b>what is a gummy bub?</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>That’s what I just said. </span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>why are yoi asking me that </b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Richie</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You said that you took something called a “Colorado gummy bub” as you will see if you scroll up</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>TYPO</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He did not elaborate.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>? Yes?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>YEP</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>What were you trying to say</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>GUMMY</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>hi cant talk to bill right now</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie puzzled over “hi” for a moment, then realized Richie had been shooting for “I.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>If you say you’re high right off the bat, no one will think you’re acting that weird</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>i cant they will be mad</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Nobody will be mad</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>youre mad</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>im so sorry</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>i shouldnt said that</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It’s okay Rich, I’m just sick. I’m definitely not mad at you</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>no u dont have to tell me that</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>im really sorry</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Richie I think it might be a good idea if you tell Bill you can’t make it</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I’m sure it would be okay</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You should play Wowee Zowee, it calms you down</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>i cant play ZOWEE WOWEE and not talk to my friends or it will be like im 34 again</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>that was a joke osrry</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I think it might be a good idea not to talk to everyone right now</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>It might stress you out</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>i have to</b>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At that moment, Bill, having always had a real instinct for timing, called them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <b>FUCK</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Richie it’s okay, I can make an excuse for you</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <b>NO!!!!!!!!!</b>
</p>
<p>
  <b>then we will know we were gay.</b>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>That ship has sailed</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Sorry, bad time for a joke. I’m going to pick up. I’m going to tell Bill something came up for you and I’ll call you afterwards</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie picked up the call. Richie was already there. His eyes were open incredibly wide and his collar was pulled askew such that his shirt appeared to be backwards.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everyone else was already on the call, too. Ben was outdoors on some kind of pale wooden porch. Stan was sitting in the basement Richie had shown Eddie in November. Bev and Mike appeared to be in a public library, surrounded by children playing math video games on the other computers. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They went around and said hellos. For a moment, Eddie thought that Richie’s wifi was broken, because he wasn’t saying anything. Then he said, “HI,” in a voice like a bingo announcer with a gun to his head. Eddie tried to make a soothing expression, but it pulled at his scar uncomfortably, and Richie kept looking away from the screen anyway. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, well, I don’t want to beat around the bush,” Bill said. “Audra’s having a baby.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everyone exploded into congratulations. Ben even clapped a little. Richie, meanwhile, looked like a baby had manifested in his apartment. Maybe the baby from </span>
  <em>
    <span>Trainspotting</span>
  </em>
  <span>, on the ceiling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Stan was smiling, but then he made a kind of weird face, and Eddie could hear typing noises. Somebody’s text alert dinged, and then Richie’s video paused, which kind of gave away whose it had been.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, I’m gonna address this right now,” Richie announced facelessly. “Stan, I’m not being an asshole on purpose! I think reproduction is awesome. Honestly, I got way too high before this. Sorry, guys. I forgot we were gonna talk.” Beverly started laughing hysterically. Stan audibly sighed. “But seriously, Bill, that is awesome.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Thanks, Richie,” Bill said, laughing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They talked about the baby for awhile, then Mike and Bev’s arduous houseboat-restoration process, then whatever Ben was doing, a meditation retreat or something. Eddie kept staring at Richie’s little video square, but of course Richie had no way of knowing he was trying to make meaningful eye contact. If Eddie hadn’t gotten sick, they would’ve been together for the call, and if they’d been together for the call, everyone would know, more or less, what was going on. As it was, Eddie, when asked what he was up to, said, “I’m coming down with something, so I stayed home from work today,” and didn’t elaborate. His apartment was so bare and nondescript that no one even asked about the new backdrop.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At the end of the call, Richie announced, “I’m sure you’ll all be thrilled to know I’m not that high anymore.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“My condolences, Richie,” Bev said. “You’ll get ‘em next time.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll get trepanned to make me high all the time, is what I’ll get.” Eddie, who had tried to explain the scientific premise of trepanations for two consecutive hours the previous week, turned bright red. Richie’s face did what it always did when he noticed Eddie turning red, because he apparently still wasn’t sober enough to repress his instinct to bite his lip and beam at Eddie in front of the others. He used to be able to repress that instinct under all manners of influence, but, Eddie figured, they weren’t in high school anymore.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Afterward, Eddie called him, because he couldn’t repress his instincts anymore either. “I feel like shit,” he said very quickly. “Can we just—I don’t  know, watch a movie or something? Like, hit play at the same time?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There was a brief shuffling noise. Then Richie said, “On it. It’ll be like </span>
  <em>
    <span>When Harry Met Sally</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This was the kind of reference Richie did not make unless he was kind of high. Normally, Richie’s references were finely calibrated for mood and brand. On drugs, he let loose and started invoking any media that crossed his mind. It was really cute. “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Exactly like </span>
  <em>
    <span>When Harry Met Sally</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” Then he thought about it for a second. “Wait, fuck you. I am not Meg Ryan.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You absolutely are Meg Ryan,” Richie said. “You know, I had a sexuality crisis when we were fifteen about that. My sisters were watching the movie, and I was like, why am I into this woman? Since when does that happen? Why did God choose to de-gay me, of all people? I deserve this less than anyone, I didn’t pray anything away. But, actually, it was just because you were Meg Ryan.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I am </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> Meg Ryan,” Eddie repeated. The only way to resolve the argument was to watch </span>
  <em>
    <span>When Harry Met Sally</span>
  </em>
  <span> together, which they did, Richie enumerating the ways in which Eddie was, in fact, Meg Ryan the whole time. Eddie didn’t tell Richie he was Billy Crystal, because he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“So, I have a question,” Eddie asked as the credits started to roll.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah?” Richie said, a little damply.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wait, Rich, are you crying?” It was a little hard to see in just the light of the computer screen, but if Eddie squinted—yep, Richie was crying.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fuck you, dude.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Meg Ryan made you </span>
  <em>
    <span>cry</span>
  </em>
  <span>?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, make fun of my tears more, it’s hot.” Richie hiccuped at </span>
  <em>
    <span>hot</span>
  </em>
  <span>, so whatever smooth-talking seductive vibe he was going for was interrupted. Eddie wondered if he should press it, or if he should change the subject. When they were kids and Richie started weeping, he would become enraged if it was ever brought up. Now, he was gentler. Eddie was gentler too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He sometimes wondered if he had, actually, loved Richie when he was a kid. He hadn't thought so then, because of how </span>
  <em>
    <span>angry</span>
  </em>
  <span> he’d get at Richie, and how angry Richie got at him. Love wasn’t anger, he had believed, or hoped, at the time. His mother had a soft-edged sort of rage, a cooing tsk-tsk anger, not sharp and naked like he and Richie’d been. Their sharp naked bodies, sharp naked rage, clattered against each other like explosive rain. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Eddie had to come to the conclusion that he’d loved Richie then, and Richie had loved him. He never wanted Richie to stop looking at him, then or now, even in anger. No matter how much he hated Richie, he wanted Richie to say something, anything to him. Give him all of his time, all of his sight. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The fact that Eddie could have loved someone he was angry at meant that anyone could. It was possible. It was possible for his mother, too, which was the worst thing about it. That it was possible with Richie was a little more complicated, equally terrible but also wonderful, because it meant Eddie got to love him at all.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie was smiling wetly, insanely at Eddie. “I was way less weepy before I killed a guy,” he said, like he was trying to convince Eddie of—of something, something truly heartbreaking. “And, like, after I was a kid. Between the ages of nineteen and 40, I cried an absolutely normal amount. Even less, maybe. Bummer you couldn't have met me back then.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Rich.” Eddie didn’t know what to say, what was okay to bring up. “For so many reasons, but not the crying.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Dude,” </span>
  </em>
  <span>Richie said, and started to cry again with renewed force.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, shit,” Eddie said. “Are you okay?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m just happy about you,” Richie said. “I feel way too lucky. It’s fucked up.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why’d you get that high before we talked, then?” Eddie asked, before he could stop himself. It was a shitty, shitty thing to say—whether Richie got high or not wasn’t really any of Eddie’s business; thinking that kind of thing was his business in high school was part of what had made him such an irredeemable asshole—so he said, “Sorry, I don’t mean to—you don’t have to answer that. Dick question.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, it’s fair,” Richie said. “God, this is actually really stupid.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What is?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I was, uh,” he started. Eddie waited. “I was gonna get a little bit high so I could, like, ask you if you wanted to tell everyone we were together. On the call. But then the fucking Colorado gummy bubs ruined everything.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie swallowed around a dry throat. “Do you feel like you have to be high to ask me things?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, obviously, not in general,” Richie said. “Just—I mean, you didn’t even tell Myra. And I didn’t want to pressure you. And, I dunno, you were already sick, and I didn’t want to be like,” he clapped briskly, “pick up the pace on your gay timeline, chop chop.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I should have told Myra.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You porking famous comedian Rich Tozier isn’t really her business.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How is that not her business? I left her for you,” Eddie said tightly. Richie’s face fell, and Eddie quickly added, “fuck. I didn’t mean it like that, Richie.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I mean, it’s kind of true. So.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s not your fault, though. I’m the one who’s an asshole.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, but, like. If you think it’s somebody’s fault, it’s kind of mine.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, come on. I don’t. I just have to tell her,” Eddie said. “Shit.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “It’s seriously not your fault, Rich. I, just, god. I haven’t really told anyone. Pretty much anything. Even that I moved.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie looked confused. “Didn’t you talk to Mike last week?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We talked about sound equipment,” Eddie said. Richie had never really understood the normal parameters of male friendship—whenever he talked to someone, he ended up pumping them for personal information, no matter their gender. Eddie had always found this baffling, because it resulted pretty reliably in harm to Richie’s person and seemed fairly easy to steer away from. For his part, Eddie understood the parameters of male friendship more or less perfectly. He had retained one friend from college, one friend from Boston, and one friend from New York, and only communicated with any of them through email and online chess. Now he and Mike called to talk about gear, and neither of them asked the other anything about his living situation, except, in Mike’s case, to explain structural problems with the boat. “And the boat,” Eddie added.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, so, the boat,” Richie said. “He talked about Bev and moving to Florida and everything and you were just like, uh huh, cool? Hi from New York”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“He didn’t talk about </span>
  <em>
    <span>Bev</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Eddie said. “We didn’t talk about the boat, like, socially. We talked about the actual physical boat. We talked about the caulking.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The </span>
  <em>
    <span>what?”</span>
  </em>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie was pretty sure Richie had heard of caulking, but he was willing to play along, because he really didn’t want to discuss coming out to his almost-ex-wife anymore, and it was sweet of Richie to give him the out. “The caulking,” he said, pronouncing the ‘L’. “The </span>
  <em>
    <span>sealant.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Plugging up holes, you mean?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“With caulk, yes.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie descended into giggles. It was the best sound in the world. “You make it sound like you and Mike are just, like—” and he wrenched the camera around so Eddie could see him do something very crude and very sexy with his hips. “Fucking the boat. Just, all the time, like the boat needs dick in it in order to remain afloat.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s what I’m doing. I’m cheating on you with Mike and a floating structure in Florida.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Just like me!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re cheating on me with Mike and a boat?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, I need dick to remain above water.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not your best work,” Eddie said, but he was laughing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The boat is a needy slut.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Stop it!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The boat needs dick and attention or it will wither and die.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think it’ll be fine for a day when I am ill.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie pretended to pick up a ringing phone. “Yes?” He said. “Is that you, boat? Oh, what’s that, now? I’m so sorry to hear that.” He held the invisible phone to his chest. “The Hanlon-Marsh-mobile would like me to inform you that it just sank to the ocean floor out of heartbreak. It found out there’s another man.”’</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s really sad,” Eddie said, then, “look, if you want to ask me something, can you just do it? Anything, okay? Like—if you asked me if I wanted to have a threesome with, I don’t know, Ben, I would—well, I wouldn’t be happy. But I wouldn’t want to get out of here. I’d want to know what the hell was going on in your mind, then I’d tell you that’s absolutely never going to happen, which it isn’t.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Dude, I don’t want to have a threesome with Ben,” Richie said. “I’m not really thinking about having a threesome with you and anyone, honestly, but especially not Ben. Ben is the opposite of my type.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, Ben’s the opposite of </span>
  <em>
    <span>my</span>
  </em>
  <span> type,” Eddie said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s so crazy. We have totally different types. Ben must be the only hot guy who isn’t either of our types.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Come on,” Eddie said. “That can’t be true.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Think about it,” Richie said. “I go for crazy-eyed, overcompensating dudes. You go for—huh. Actually, I don’t know. What are you, like, into?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think you have as good an idea as anyone of what I’m into, Rich.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, like, I know the individual instances. But what’s the throughline?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie considered what he did and did not find arousing. The camera wasn’t really pointed at Richie anymore—it was just some of his hair and the ceiling—so he didn’t have much of a visual aid. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I—don’t laugh, I’m just going to. You know. Brainstorm. Spitball.” Richie repositioned the camera and mimed zipping his lips shut. “Okay. Well. I guess I like anything… see-through or glossy or pink. Or, like—slimy, kind of.” Richie’s lips were, technically, still shut. He was also, technically, not laughing, but his whole face had creased up into hysterics. “Oh, fuck you,” Eddie said. Richie waggled his eyebrows in desperation. “Look, you might as well talk, if you’re going to be like that.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It sounds like you want to fuck a hagfish,” Richie said. “Wait. Dude, hold on. Is that why you asked if I had knitting needles around?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh my fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>god</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Eddie said. “What is wrong with you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Nothing, according to your sexual tastes,” Richie said. “Every part of my body is either see-through or glossy or pink. And it is literally all slimy.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I was just </span>
  <em>
    <span>very vulnerable</span>
  </em>
  <span>—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing!” Richie said. “Eds, I don’t get it, but this is great for me. I get to fuck the hottest guy in the world because he likes how slimy I am.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, thank you, Rich, but there are hotter guys.” Eddie said, sort of distantly. If Richie was freaked out by his textural preferences, which were really the tip of the iceberg, he should probably not tell Richie about how much he liked seeing him damp-eyed and sweet and totally open, like he sometimes got during sex, if Eddie bossed him around a little. Or the fact that he had, several times, gotten fired up about pressing the enter key at work, and once because he stepped in some melted ice cream, after he overcame his immediate revulsion. He’d also had a passing urge or two to put contacts in Richie’s eyes for him, which was the weirdest train of thought he had ever even </span>
  <em>
    <span>heard</span>
  </em>
  <span> of, not to mention been aroused by. He could walk the enter key thing back—the mere idea of entry sent him into a frenzy, these days, and he liked surfaces that reacted when he touched them, as well as the relief and sense of competence that came from sending an email. But the eye thing? The ice cream? There was no sex act that corresponded with the human eyeball, and the only thing that the ice cream could possibly relate to was the vague notion of chilled semen on the floor, which he did not want.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“There are literally not,” Richie said. “No man has ever been as hot as you, or as perfect for me. I mean, even sexually. We have great sex.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We do, don’t we?” Eddie was caught off-guard by a grin. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That we fucking do.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You have to say something now,” Eddie told him. “I just told you something totally mortifying and you made fun of me, so you really have to say something now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I just told you you are the perfect man for me and the best lay of my life,” Richie said. “Clearly it doesn’t bother me that much that you wish I was a prehistoric eel. Anyway, sex is sort of the,” he did an unpleasant hand gesture, “union of shiny, pink, see-through things. But the way you worded it? So weird. I more meant, like, actors. Harrison Ford, that kind of thing. This is way better, though.” Eddie felt a little better, too. In retrospect, he could tell that, yes, it was a pretty weird thing for someone to say, but he couldn’t think of a more normal way to phrase it. Anyway, Richie seemed to be having a good time, if the way he was smiling now was any indication. “Pretty hot when you word things weird,” Richie said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“My head is full of snot, Rich,” Eddie said. “Nothing I do right now is hot.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah? Is it slimy?” Richie said. “Are you getting off on your post-nasal drip right now?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, god. Ugh,” Eddie said. “What the fuck, dude?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie paused, looking contemplative. “I’m trying to think of a joke about something dripping down my throat, but I can’t,” he said. “What’s happening to me? What did you do?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s concerning,” Eddie said, because Richie not being able to think of a dick joke really was unusual. “Did you run into a wall?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, I just really want you to fuck me,” Richie said, and then his face went through a very quick process of shifting from what looked like mild wide-eyed horror to half-lidded lip-biting and back. “Sorry. I’m pretty much braindead right now. Just putting my cards on the table.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For a second, Eddie couldn’t say anything, mostly because he’d gotten very suddenly dizzy from blood redirection. Then he cleared his throat, which made him cough, which made him clear his throat again. “Well, that would be physically impossible,” he said. “Since I’m three and a half miles away.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie’s brow furrowed for a second, then he said, “You know how you can see and hear me right now?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes, Rich. I’m aware that I can see and hear you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, well, I’m just saying, like. I’m a performer. So, um. If you’ve got any requests. I take ‘em. Requests, I mean. And… yup.” He ran a hand through his hair a little manically. “Just some more cards, in case you wanted more cards. I don’t know if you did, but here they are.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie came to two corresponding realizations: that Richie was talking about phone sex, and that he was turned on. He had a pattern of talking and looking at Eddie when he was fired up that fluctuated from direct to coy to looking and sounding kind of concussed. Whenever he saw it, Eddie was struck by the urge to document it, to study exactly how long he would have to spend doing certain things to get Richie past the point of oscillation and into total speechlessness. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then, a third realization: Eddie had never had phone sex and had no idea how to proceed. He considered removing his shirt, but he looked truly awful, clammy and pale, and that might be too forward—he didn’t know what the etiquette was. He tugged at his collar awkwardly, which, for whatever reason, made Richie look very, </span>
  <em>
    <span>very </span>
  </em>
  <span>concussed. Suddenly, Eddie didn’t feel particularly awkward, because whatever part of his brain had always been obsessed with concussing Richie was sending out such cacophonous </span>
  <em>
    <span>keep going </span>
  </em>
  <span>signals that every other segment was drowned out entirely. It was addicting in almost the same way as confusing Richie by shoving his glasses back on his head or sticking a finger in his ear was addicting: there was nothing like short-circuiting Richie. Especially when his face went all slack and wide-eyed, like he couldn’t talk even if he tried.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You want me to take my shirt off?” Eddie asked. He wasn’t really aware of what words were coming out of his mouth until he’d already said them. Richie nodded. “That’s a shitty response, Rich,” Eddie said. “It’s a yes or no question.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes,” Richie said. “Please. Please, please take your shirt off.” He only ever said </span>
  <em>
    <span>please</span>
  </em>
  <span> in two situations: sex and really profound distress, the kind even Eddie had only seen a few times. When he didn’t have anything to hide behind, basically.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Take yours off first,” Eddie said psychotically. But before Eddie could berate himself too much for being insane, Richie was setting the laptop down and shrugging out of his t-shirt, his torso tensing in increments as he pulled it up over his head. The collar fucked his hair up even worse than it already had been, and he had to adjust his crooked glasses. “That’s great,” Eddie said. “You weren’t kidding about taking requests, huh?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie bit his lip. Eddie could hear his breath going shallow. “No, I. Yeah,” he said, voice gravelly. “Anything you want. But, uh. Can you…” His face was pink already, the color starting to spread to his neck. It was crazy how fast it happened, sometimes, how easy it was to catch him off guard. How easy it was for Eddie to catch him off guard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Can I what?” Eddie said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Your shirt.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You want me to take my shirt off?” Richie nodded. “Really? Again? You don’t have anything to say?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie half-laughed breathily. “Listen, I cannot put two words together right now,” he said. “My brain is fucking fried.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You can probably try,” Eddie said. “I mean, you said anything I want. So.” He ran his thumb over the placket absently, and Richie’s breath seemed to catch in his throat. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I did that, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Eddie felt more than thought, with a jolt of maniacal, possessing glee.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I really want you to take your shirt off,” Richie said. “Please.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie made an embarrassing sound, worse because he was so congested, then cleared his throat again to cover it up. “Alright,” he said. His hands were surprisingly steady as he undid the buttons, one by one. By the time he’d pushed it off his shoulders, Richie had brought a hand to his mouth and was staring at him slack-jawed, thumb at his lower lip. Eddie felt the brief urge to demand whether Richie was hamming it up or no, whether he actually felt like that or if he was just humoring Eddie, but then Richie’s thumb slipped a little to pull at his lip, the inside of his mouth pink and white and wet, and Eddie heard himself saying, “yeah, can you put your fingers in your mouth for me?”, from what felt like a distance of several yards.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Without a beat of hesitation, Richie slipped two fingers into his mouth. There was a gentle sucking sound, and Eddie said, “holy shit,” and Richie hummed, almost whimpered, shutting his eyes briefly. “Hey, Rich,” Eddie said. “Come on. What’s the point if you close your eyes?” Richie opened his eyes wide, then, and Eddie licked his thumb and moved one hand to his nipple, flicking it gently. This time, Richie moaned around his fingers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Most of the time, Eddie hated how, for all that his own patterns were sometimes bizarre and disturbing, they were also very, very obvious. He wanted Richie with his face messed up and something in his mouth, he wanted him speechless and damp, he wanted him to trust Eddie to take care of everything—he wanted Richie flayed alive with only Eddie to stitch him back up, god fucking help Eddie. Eddie was tremendously easy to mock, always had been, and this wasn’t just easy to mock, it was easy to reprehend.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Richie didn’t reprehend him, no matter how many times Eddie asked for the same stupid-sounding things, his voice box and his brain seemingly on different planets: open your mouth for me, hold still for me, look at me. He just stared at Eddie glassily, sometimes with an almost-smile, but it was closer to the face he made in awe than the one he did in amusement. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Now Eddie felt a whirling amphetaminic rush as he said, “god, you’re perfect, Rich,” and pressed the heel of his free hand to his crotch, because Richie was clutching at the sheets with the hand that wasn’t in his mouth and it seemed unfair to start jerking off before he’d told Richie to. He pinched his nipple and gasped, and Richie looked like he’d been clotheslined. “Okay, take your fingers out of your mouth,” Eddie said, a little winded, and Richie did, with the soft, wet noise of a seal breaking. “Can you move the camera? I want to see more of you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Jesus fuck,” Richie scraped out, and then the screen wobbled like it was about to fall off the side of the bed for a minute. Eddie braced for a loud crash, but none came. Instead, the camera stabilized again, and now he could see Richie hard in the Smithers boxers. They were really incredibly threadbare; Eddie couldn’t remember ever loving an article of clothing more. Richie had one hand splayed on his abdomen, tensing and untensing, veins and tendons rising and falling, and Eddie thought he could make out the slick spot where his wet fingers had smeared spit onto the hair by his navel.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie backed up against the headboard and kicked off his pajama pants, and Richie half-laughed, half-sighed. “Go to hell,” Eddie said. “See if I ever give you the go-ahead for touching your dick now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>God,” </span>
  </em>
  <span>Richie said. He’d been propping himself up on one elbow, but now he sort of collapsed, smushing the side of his face into the pillow. The angle meant Eddie couldn’t make out much of Richie’s expression, but the way he could see Richie’s throat convulsing almost made up for it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Just kidding. Put a hand in your boxers for me,” Eddie said absurdly. Richie inhaled, sharp and wet, and made a little </span>
  <em>
    <span>mm-hmm</span>
  </em>
  <span> noise, then tried to find the waistband, running a hand over his stomach, down the line of hair below his navel. He couldn’t see, Eddie realized with a jolt. He couldn’t see because he was looking at Eddie, because Eddie had told him to. Eddie actually had to dig his nails into his thigh to keep himself from doing something rash—he didn’t even know what—or saying something rash, or passing out.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie had his hand in his boxers, but he didn’t move it, just kept it there, twitching, and Eddie could hear his breath, rapid, shuddering half-pants. It was fucking beautiful. He was beautiful. Eddie wanted to cradle him, somehow, like something embryonic and bare, something blinking and new. He also wanted to bend Richie over the dinner table. And he wanted to see him, everything, all the time, because there was a point he could arrive at—he was there now—where he didn’t care what Richie’s body did, as long as he made it happen. He wanted anything Richie could possibly do or say or be, and he wanted it badly.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You can move now, baby,” Eddie said. He had a sharp pain in his sternum from calling anyone baby, which he had never done before, or even thought before, and he went into a mild and brief panic before Richie’s hand started moving and he pretty much forgot everything.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie made a small, muffled sound that resembled, “thank you.” He twitched and swallowed, and his forearm flexed, muscles and veins shifting rhythmically under the skin. The red, wet head of his dick tugged and inched above the waistband of his boxers, moving under his hand, and that was fucking it for Eddie. He needed to jerk off right the fuck now, or he would die, so he started, and Richie, still looking at him, gasped a little and sped up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie moved the camera with his free hand, tipping it over a few times before resting it on what appeared to be a pillow, at a better angle. Eddie could see his hand moving rapidly and his face, too, or at least his eyes and cheeks. His eyebrows were furrowed, lids lowered, and his glasses had half-slid off. His left hand was on his chest, flexing and unflexing subtly, so Eddie told him to put his fingers back in his mouth, and his eyes fluttered shut. “No. Look at me, Rich,” Eddie said, feeling crazy. Nobody should ever let Eddie talk when he was jerking off, it was </span>
  <em>
    <span>bad</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Richie did it, eyes huge and glassy. “Oh, fuck,” he said around his fingers, choking on them a little. There was sweat in the stubble on his upper lip and spit around his mouth. “Eddie. God.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I want you to come,” Eddie said. “Can you do that for me? I want you to come for me, and I want to see it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie made a few soft, broken noises, and then he did come. Eddie was a little shocked by how soon he followed, shocked by how sudden and sharp it felt.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie opened his eyes, which he’d squeezed shut, and he could see Richie lying on his back, panting. “Holy shit,” Richie said. “Holy, holy shit.” He was very sweaty, and very red, and there were a few shiny lines of cum on his stomach. Eddie felt like he was going to either explode or implode, hard to say which. He wiped his hands off with a tissue, then used hand sanitizer for good measure. The hand sanitizer was probably a little ridiculous, but what the hell. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Richie was too thoroughly obliterated to tease Eddie about the Purell, apparently, but he did seem inspired to do something about his own situation. He swatted at the mattress until he found his shirt, which he used to wipe off his stomach. “Richie, </span>
  <em>
    <span>gross,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> Eddie said emphatically.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What, you want me to let it get all crusty? I’m out of tissues,” Richie said. “You gotta think it through next time you tell a guy to come where you can see it.” He balled up the shirt and threw it—somewhere Eddie preferred not to figure out. “Not that I’m complaining. Honestly, if you told me to, I’d let it get all crusty.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie was struck by several simultaneous and extremely vivid sensory images, some appealing and others truly horrifying. “Crusty and slimy are opposites,” he said, instead of making any real effort to articulate the thoughts.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Crusty’s slimy plus time,” Richie said, which was pretty clever, actually. “Like, I’m slimy now, but in ten years, I will definitely be crusty.” It was hard to tell exactly how seriously self-deprecating Richie was actually trying to be, because he was saying everything in pretty much the same dazed tone and with the same just-saw-god expression. Then he scrubbed at his eyes under his glasses (with the hand he’d just come on, which struck Eddie with even more confusing sensory images) and said, “You got me good, Eds. Jesus.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah. That was, uh,” Eddie said. “That was kind of crazy.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yup,” Richie said. “Every time, I think, okay, </span>
  <em>
    <span>now</span>
  </em>
  <span> it’s going to stop being completely crazy. Like, it’ll go down to a more normal craziness level. And it just doesn’t.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe in twenty years,” Eddie said, too fucked out to really think about how weird and too-much a thing that was to say until he said it. Richie’d said, </span>
  <em>
    <span>in ten years,</span>
  </em>
  <span> but that didn’t necessarily imply that Eddie would be around to see him then, just that he would get independently crusty. But Richie didn’t seem upset, or even like he particularly registered what Eddie had said—he was still panting at the ceiling, clearly on the verge of passing out—so it was probably fine. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eddie was on the verge of sleep himself, too tired even to worry about the whole ten-or-twenty-or-years issue at much greater length. “I have to go to sleep,” he said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe you’re Billy Crystal after all.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fuck you,” Eddie said. “This is not me acting like Harry. I can’t virtually hold you, dumbass. Also, I’m sick.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I know, I know,” Richie said. “I know you’re not hitting it and quitting it. Plus, if you did, that’d be okay. It’s within your rights.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, as a general rule, I wouldn’t want to,”  Eddie said, then he sneezed four times in a row. “God, I hate being sick,” he muttered.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You should get in your nasally impressions while you can,” Richie said. “I’m just saying.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m not going to do Milhouse,” Eddie said. “I’m never going to fucking do Milhouse.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And no Squidward?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No Squidward either.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“God dammit,” Richie said. “What if I could only get off if you were doing a Squidward voice?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I love you, but not enough for that,” Eddie said. “Luckily, I have proof it isn’t true.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know about that. You sounded a little like Squidward, just then. Maybe that’s what did it for me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You are a prick,” Eddie said. “Goodnight.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Night,” Richie said. “Love you too.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>richie and eddie have phone sex, eddie is pretty dommy and richie is pretty subby, and there isn't really a discussion of parameters beforehand. nothing extreme, but keep it in mind if that dynamic isn't your preference. also we spelled come (noun form) as cum for consistency with the cum gutters incident... sorry about that everybody.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>this chapter is pretty heavy, more or less on the level of movie canon. more info in the endnote if you need specific warnings. homophobic slur warning also continues to apply</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Richie</b>
</p><p>Richie hadn’t <em> lied </em> to Eddie about why he’d gotten high. Eddie hated being deceived, even a little bit, always had, so Richie hadn’t pulled anything out of his ass. He’d wanted to ask Eddie, and he’d wanted—well, he hadn’t particularly wanted to announce it to everyone, that was fucking terrifying, but he <em> had </em>selfishly wanted everyone to somehow come away from the conversation magically having found out they were together. But he hadn’t told Eddie the whole truth, either, and was pretty sure he couldn’t. The truth was that Richie’d gotten high after he remembered, with oily shame, that the worst fight he ever had with anyone he loved had been with Bill. It wasn’t even the fight they’d had about the clown; this one was all Richie.</p><p>They were all seventeen, maybe eighteen. Richie had called Bev the day before, and when she picked up the phone, she’d said, “Who is this? How did you get my number?” Richie had been so shocked that he just stood there, exhaling damply into his parents’ landline. She said, “Quit breathing into the phone and tell me,” which was bad, and then, “I have a gun in the house,” which was worse. </p><p>After he choked out, “It’s Richie,” she said nothing, so he kept babbling stupidly in the hope that she would remember: “I’m the idiot with the bad teeth? You used to give me cigarettes and beep me?” Finally, she’d said, “oh my god, Richie! I’m so sorry, I didn’t recognize your voice for some reason.” In hindsight, of course, it had been the clown, but at the time Richie thought that he was just being forgotten, that everyone would forget him.</p><p>About a week later, they were in Mike’s barn, all of them except for Eddie, who was at cross-country practice. Bill was complaining about it—he had wanted someone to play a very complex drinking game with, and Eddie was the only one willing to put up —and said something about Eddie’s running shorts seeming gay. Stan had tried to shake his head minutely, but Bill just looked at him quizzically and continued: “Why’s Eddie always hanging out with Luke Hannity in those faggy little matching outfits anyway? He said he’d play drunk Simon Says with me.”</p><p>Richie remembered, clear as fucking day, standing up and telling Bill that Bev thought Richie was Bill on the phone because he called her up and didn’t say anything, just breathed. Bill tried to speak, but Richie could hear the edges of a stutter around his words, and he pulled at them like stitches. “Oh, you think I’m lying? You loooove her? Let’s call her up! Let’s call her up right now and see! Everybody, to the house, we’re calling Bev Marsh! You wanna say something, Bill? Because it sounds like you have something to say. What is it?” Richie clapped briskly, loudly, right in his face, successfully making Bill jump. “Chop, chop.”</p><p>Bill had stood up, silent and glaring, opening and closing his fists, but Richie plowed on. “You know, I think Bill wishes he were gay, so he could talk to a girl without popping a boner and making her flee the state. He also wishes that he could talk to a girl.” Richie paused and looked pensive until Bill tried to speak again, now definitely stuttering, before Richie cut him off with, “or that he could talk!” </p><p>Richie started doing some vicious inverted version of standup, at that point, pacing and throwing around Voices. “You know, I think a little bit of a lithp,” he drew out the word ‘lisp’, whistling gently between his teeth, “would be better than what Bill hath—” and Bill cut him off my shoving him bodily into a hay bail, knocking down a pile of rakes. Richie hit his tailbone and his head, and it fucking <em> hurt </em> , but what was worse was the little pained noise that he made, which was probably higher-pitched than a buzzing fly. Richie leaned into it, turning it into a sex noise, and screamed, “ <em> OH, TAKE ME, BILL.”  </em></p><p>At that point, Mike’s granddad burst in and asked what all the ruckus was about, and Richie declared, “Bill’s trying to have gay sex with me, aren’t’cha, Bill?” Bill, red with rage, said nothing. “Aren’t’cha, Big Bill?” Nothing. “Aren’t’cha?” Nada. </p><p>Mike’s granddad had told them, in no uncertain terms, to get the hell out of his barn and stop getting in fights. Mike told Richie, “You are such an asshole.” Stan had left the minute he heard anything about faggy shorts and/or Luke Hannity, like an animal sensing a storm. Or, Richie supposed, like a Stanley Uris who knew that Richie was both a mean little cunt and actively having sex with Eddie, and that he would probably resent the implications of any evaluation of the fagginess-level of Eddie’s shorts. Ben was at the library; if he’d been with them, he probably would’ve deterred them from getting in a fight in the first place by looking all panicked as soon as things started going south.</p><p>These were the two factors that led Richie Tozier to finger Rachel Manning, whom Stan had dated in eleventh grade, in the bathroom at Cavill’s Bowlarama the following night. One: <em> you’re in love with Eddie Kaspbrak, and he’s going to forget you the moment you stop sucking his dick </em> was a pretty bad thought to have, as an adult and as a teenager, and it had been playing on a loop in Richie’s brain since the phone call with Bev. Two: Richie had made a compelling argument to all of his friends that he was a worthless piece of shit already, so it wasn’t like he was likely to go down in their estimation. He could be smart for once in his life and develop a plan B, and what better plan B was there than fingering his best friend’s ex-girlfriend in the bathroom of a bowling alley? In fact, there were few worse plans B, but Richie was, inexorably, himself.</p><p>Her lips had been sticky, Richie remembered. The whole experience, really, had been sticky, sticky and high-pitched and chemical-tasting. He wasn’t trying to heterofy himself—by that point, he had come to the uncomfortable understanding that he was going to be gay for the rest of his life—but he’d thought, “what the heck? Why <em> not </em> finger Rachel Manning in the bowling alley bathroom?” </p><p>Some reasons why not, it turned out, were that Eddie would be very, very angry at him, as would Stan, as was Rachel Manning, because he never spoke to her again, and Rachel Manning’s boyfriend at the time, who broke Richie’s nose and dislocated his shoulder that Monday. The nose recovered, but the shoulder still clicked when Richie shrugged at 40. Really, though, the dislocated shoulder had been a good thing, because Rachel had told her friends that Richie was gay in order to avoid looking like a slut. The rumor might have gained more traction had her boyfriend not provided physical evidence in the form of a sling that something had happened for him to be mad about. </p><p>The clown couldn’t tear them apart, but, as it turned out, Richie Tozier’s assholery could. Really, Richie thought now, he’d been a lot like the clown that day, preying on people’s weaknesses and making horrible, cruel jokes and clapping in their faces so they’d stutter. He went on to become a professional clown, and the analogy really couldn't get any better if he’d changed his name to Pennywise. </p><p>Bill had pretty much moved past the faggy shorts breakdown by the time they graduated, but their friendship never fully recovered. And then they forgot, and then they had to fight demon-Richie in the sewers, so there was never a chance to apologize. And what would he even say? <em> Sorry for getting possessed by a Pazuzu and shrieking at you, I was invested in Edward Kaspbrak’s gay little shorts for normal boy reasons?  </em></p><p>Also, he did not want to remind Bill that he’d called <em> anything </em> faggy, because Bill hadn’t even meant it in a particularly hurtful or even specifically homophobic way, and he was a good guy. It was deeply unpleasant to watch well-intentioned straight people carefully step around words, thinking them over and over in their head with such transparent, earnest eyes, like <em> faggy faggy faggy—what a good boy I am, not saying faggity-fag! </em>That, Richie had spent all his life doing nearly anything to avoid. </p><p>Maybe Bill had known about Eddie, and maybe he hadn’t. But it didn’t seem fair to offload that shit onto Eddie, who had enough to worry about without knowing one of his best friends had either seen through him or just been a teenage asshole, impossible to say. Richie didn’t have a lot, but he had experience with straight people who were both saying and trying not to say faggy, and he felt like it was his duty to at least act as a human shield.</p><p>After the Rachel Manning incident, Richie’d basically moved into Stan’s basement, sleeping there for weeks on end and making Stan transcribe his homework, because he didn’t want his parents to see the sling. This lasted until a teacher called them both into her office and asked if Stan was cheating for Richie. Stan was patient, but he was not perfect, and he couldn't stand having his integrity questioned by an authority figure, so Richie went back home for a few days, during which time his father threatened to cut off Richie’s now-shoulder-length hair while he slept, and Richie threatened to do the same to his sister, who told his mother, who whispered something very harsh about child-rearing to Wentworth. </p><p>Wentworth ended up seeing the sling, discarded next to a pile of comic books and cigar boxes, despite Richie’s best efforts. He asked Richie if he was being bullied, with <em> implications, </em> and tried to look supportive of, if not his son’s gayness, then his right to be passively, inoffensively homosexual without getting beaten up. Richie had his pride, already wounded as it was, so he said, “Does Mom know about the pay-per-view porn you watch at night?” It was a shot in the dark, really, but turned out to be correct. Wentworth froze and turned red and then <em> he </em> started stuttering, because Wentworth Tozier would probably rather his son tell him he knew about a body chopped up in the shed than about his masturbation habits. Richie suspected, at the time, that his dad did not even jerk off, just stared off into the distance of some blond girl getting fucked. He wondered, now, if that was too much to put in a set. Probably. </p><p>Wentworth had been too irate even to accuse Richie of consuming straight porn, so Richie left the house and biked to Stan’s. He stood sobbing outside the glass door of the kitchen, with his glasses pushed up to his hair and his hands in his eyes. When Stan asked him what was wrong, Richie managed to choke out, “I told my dad—” and then he made a truly awful noise that still echoed in his brain. “I told my dad I knew about his porn.”</p><p>Stan threw open the door and said “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” It was a good fucking question. Richie collapsed into the mud, smearing it on his knees in such a way that it must have really looked like he’d been blowing Stan when he stood, and said “a lot. A fucking lot, Stan.”</p><p>He’d almost told Stan, then and there, about the gay thing, at least, if not the specifics of what he had been doing with Eddie Kaspbrak in Stan’s basement, but Stan, thankfully, stopped him. Later, Stan had been quite insistent about getting the mud off Richie’s knees, which should have tipped Richie off that he knew <em> something </em> was going on between Richie and other guys’ dicks.</p><p>Of course, through all of this, nothing <em> was </em>going on with Richie and other guys’ dicks, because Eddie wasn’t talking to him. Neither was Bill, obviously, or Mike. Ben floated between their splinter groups like a severely wounded peace dove. At lunch, Richie and Stan would sit with all of Stan’s Mathlete friends, who hated Richie’s guts, but Richie was also being exiled by everyone who used to think he was cool in a deranged and distant way, because Rachel’s boyfriend was actually up-close-and-personal cool and had turned everyone against him. So Richie had no one else. He stared across the cafeteria at Eddie and Bill, who were probably playing fucking Egyptian rat screw over there, which Richie had never been able to grasp the rules of. Richie was criminally bad at all card games; that was probably how Bill knew he was a faggity-fag.</p><p>This lasted about a month, until Eddie got into college, at which point, probably floating on the certainty that whatever bullshit he endured in Derry had an expiration date, Eddie stormed the Uris basement and leapt on Richie like an attacking flying squirrel. “Watch the arm, you incubus,” Richie had squawked, knocked onto his back on the sectional. In retrospect, Stan had definitely heard that, at least.</p><p>Poor Stan might have also heard whatever noises Richie made, because he later asked Richie how much he’d liked “doing that thing” with Rachel Manning, which was so out-of-character that even Richie could smell a sexuality crisis. The scent of am-I-gay only got stronger when Richie took what information he had about Rachel Manning’s vagina and weaved a fairly convincing tale about his heterosexual sexploits. He’d been so confident in this lie that he never thought Stan was trying to figure out if he was gay in comparison to Richie’s definitive gayness—Richie’d thought Stan was comparing his own Rachel Manning expierience to Richie’s definitive <em> straightness </em>and felt a bit smug about it. In retrospect, the noises emanating from the basement were probably pretty ambiguous, gender-wise—Richie had a tendency to do that, especially at a tender age—and Stan, who did not hear many sex noises, might have gotten confused about his own involuntary responses to them.</p><p>There was no point talking to Stan about any of this. Stan would probably be very mad if he brought it up, in fact. But, because Richie was a fucking adult, he did call Bev a few days later to tell her, “There was this one time, I called you, and you didn’t remember me for a while. And I’m not trying to be like ,‘fuck Beverly, she’s the only one who was affected by clown magic,’ but—yeah. I guess I really fucking missed you.”</p><p>Bev was prowling small-town Florida antique shops at the time. From what Richie could gather, this was because Mike had told Bev that water was not going to smash the plate she was threatening to hurl overboard in the middle of a fight they were having, and that going ashore and smashing it would be more emotionally satisfying. This had resulted in Bev sliding all of their tableware into the ocean. </p><p>Now, Bev was scouring one store after another for the ugliest replacements she could find, with Swiss children on them and such. This all pretty much tracked. Mike was a smart guy, but he went around thinking that everyone else was an idiot, probably because he’d had to shoulder the burden of so much knowledge alone for so long. While Bev didn’t particularly mind being treated like an idiot more than an ordinary person did, she was so pathologically unpredictable that it was hard to consistently act like her shepherd. The sheeple do not return to the flock with a plate that depicts a Swedish boy displaying his pink buttcheeks.</p><p><em> They’re going to be fine, </em> Richie thought, listening to Bev rail against Mike’s “dumbfuck condescending librarian virgin routine.” <em> They’re gonna be so, so annoying, but they will be fine. </em> He felt some relief over this. There was nothing like your two weirdest friends, both of whom thought that they were special and uniquely damned and completely alone in the world, having to share a houseboat and argue over WiFi. Nobody was special and damned in a Florida houseboat, it would seem. The state of Maine might build calcified loneliness, but the state of Florida absolutely chipped it away. Piece by piece, buttcheek by buttcheek, they seemed to be learning that they were not the two most alien individuals on earth. </p><p>Bev said, “I missed you too, Richie. I missed you when I didn’t know who you were anymore, I just knew that some sort of person was gone. I thought it was my…” She trailed off.</p><p>“It’s okay, dude, I’m not gonna think you think I’m your father.”</p><p>“Yeah, well,” she said, kind of soft, which about summed it up.</p><p>“Okay, listen to this,” Richie said, throwing her an emotional-avoidance bone. “Did I ever tell you that I fingered Stanley’s ex in a bowling alley?”</p><p>Bev barked out a laugh. “You <em> whore, </em>” she said. “You complete slut.”</p><p>“I know, okay, I know. But I fingered Stan’s ex in a bowling alley bathroom, and I was dating—”</p><p>“Luke Hannity, right,” Bev said. “That’s so fucking weird. He was hideous.”</p><p>“Okay, well, putting aside what an asshole you’re being about my cherished high school boyfriend, yes, I was dating Luke Hannity.” Richie felt a pang of mixed regret and relief over losing the opening again. But then Bev made a muffled noise of interest, and he smiled, because he knew she’d like this story. “Listen, I didn’t know we were dating. I thought I was, like, his—”</p><p>“Mildewy sex doll?”</p><p>“Mean! Mean, Bev, mean!”</p><p>“Sorry, that was mean. Anyway, about you and Stan’s sloppy seconds?”</p><p>“Right! Okay, so I third-based Stan’s ex-girlfriend, and she was, like, kinda sticky—”</p><p>“<em> Sticky?” </em></p><p>“Yeah, she was sticky, her lips were sticky, leave me the fuck alone. But, anyway, you wanna know why I did it?”</p><p>“Because you were trying to replace me?”</p><p>“Actually, yes. How did it take you this long to figure out I was gay?”</p><p>“Because you’re a manly man.”</p><p>“That’s a stereotype.”</p><p>“Listen, honey, I worked in the fashion industry. I know a stereotype when I see one.”</p><p>“And?”</p><p>“And you are a very masculine lumberjack. A comic lumberjack.”</p><p>“Right. Thank you, Bev, I knew it. Anyway, I got with Stan’s GF—her name was Rachel Manning, and she had a crush on me—”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Can I finish my fucking Stan sloppy seconds story?”</p><p>“Yes, continue with the fucking S.S.S.S.” </p><p>“<em> Thank </em> you. Okay, so Rachel Manning had this boyfriend, right, and her boyfriend beat me  up, and Stan was mad at me, and she was mad at me, and everyone was mad at me because I was a real dick in Mike’s barn the day before.”</p><p>“Oooo,” Bev said. “Elaborate!”</p><p>“Okay, I, um. Ahhh.” Richie put a hand over his face. “Hm. Okay, but you can’t hate me.”</p><p>“Am I crazy, or did I threaten to shoot you over the phone?”</p><p>“Yes’m. However. This was worse.”</p><p>“Damn, Richie. I am excited.”</p><p>“So, Bill called Eddie’s shorts faggy—” Bev did a dry little sputter. “What, you got something to say about Eddie’s cross-country shorts?”</p><p>“No.” She was clicking with laughter. “No, nope, I have nothing to say about Eddie’s very straight little shorts.”</p><p>“Well, Bill did. And I. Um.”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“Made fun of his stutter. Also, I told him you were creeped out by him, and were gonna shoot him, so. Yeah.”</p><p>“<em> Jesus. </em> Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Richie, you know you are a crazy man, right? That you are off your rocker?”</p><p>“Off it and only now trying to climb back on. I told Bill that it would be better if he had a little lithp, and then I fucked Stan’s ex.”</p><p>“Well, I don’t hate you.” She laughed. “I actually like you more, you crazy fucker.” It seemed that she was still angry that Bill blamed her for inducing him to cheat on Audra, which was as understandable as it was counterproductive. Richie wondered if the Bev-Mike fight had been about Bill—Mike was Bill’s best friend, had been even before Richie’s temporary psychosis in Mike’s barn. Back in Derry, the two of them had managed to bicycle imperiously, and Richie couldn’t imagine that they were less annoying together now.</p><p>“You still pissed at Bill?” Richie asked, because Bev’s total lack of filter tended to do away with whatever trace amounts of filter he had,too.</p><p>“Yeah. Whenever he sees me in the background when he and Mike are Skyping, he, like, recoils and shuts up. But, also, I’m pissed at everyone,” she said. “Well, everyone but you. And Ben. Who could be pissed at Ben, though?”</p><p>Richie thought about the several thousands of hysteria-tinged complaints Eddie had made to him about Ben over the years. These had included: no one is that nice unless they want something; why does he look sad that I cheated on the history test? Is he a fucking guidance counselor?; his face is stupid; if you already live in Buttfuck, Colorado, why would you need to retreat <em> further </em> to meditate? Instead of voicing any of this, Richie said, “I’m pretty easy to be pissed at.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Bev said. “You are. You’re easy to get over being mad at, though. You and Ben are the dopiest out of the group.” Richie sputtered. “Sorry,” she added. “I would give a <em> lot </em>for Mike to get dopier right now. He never does puppy dog eyes. How am I supposed to forgive a man who isn’t doing puppy dog eyes? It’s degrading for me.”</p><p>Richie wasn’t pissed at Bill, exactly, and certainly not in a way that puppy dog eyes would help. (Puppy dog eyes weren’t at all necessary on Richie, anyway. He had no compunctions about degrading himself, so he didn’t really require sheepishness from anyone else.) They’d barely spoken since Bill had gotten back to England, and when they had it’d been over text or in a group call.</p><p>Now, Bill was going to have a fucking baby. Richie wondered if it had actually been Bill who’d knocked up his wife—he didn’t know the exact limits of the clown infertility curse, and he wasn’t about to ask—but it seemed like a bad thing to make a joke about.</p><p>Of all the people Richie had never thought of as dads, including himself, Bill was at the top of the list. Bill had always hated dads not only in theory but also, genuinely, in practice. He hadn’t been as obnoxious to parents as Richie, or as terrified-polite as Eddie, or as genuinely good-natured as Stan. He did everything you were supposed to do, as a teenager in someone else’s dad’s home, but always with a bored, watery stare of utter contempt for everything Derry adults were or would ever be. </p><p>“These fucking ignorant <em> shits </em> ,” Bill’d said when he was drunk and fifteen. “They did all this shit because of the clown, and they didn’t even know it. They’re like animals.” And then he had to say <em> fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, fuck, </em>because he’d started stuttering again, and swearing got him back into the rhythm of speaking. He tried to say, “they let their kids die, because they don’t—” and got stuck in a rut after he said ‘die’ that he couldn’t pull out of, so he just screamed, “FUCK YOU” at the ceiling of Richie’s room, and the world, and everyone who had ever reproduced. He came back downstairs looking totally normal and nodded silently at Wentworth before sneaking some of his nice whiskey into a metal flask, which had coffee in it. Wentworth was understandably creeped out. </p><p>Wentworth never asked if Bill was okay, like he did with Richie, and sometimes Eddie, even though Bill had a speech impediment and a dead brother, or maybe because of that. Either way, Wentworth seemed to pick up on the fact that the answer to this question was <em> no, and he hates you for a sin you don’t know you already committed, and he will never, ever stop. </em> Richie’s dad had been good at picking up on vibes—gay and otherwise—but it did him absolutely no good, because he could never see the truths behind them. So he would sit and Bill would stare at him, hating him for the way he walked and spoke and handled a fork, and Wentworth would know but not know why. Richie derived a weird sadistic glee from his dad’s discomfort, and he invited Bill over as much as possible so that he could watch Wentworth squirm, thinking, <em> how’s it feel, dad? </em> Which was, admittedly, pretty terrible. Richie had been pretty terrible.</p><p>Now Richie was a little less terrible to Wentworth, and Bill had a house in LA. Bill had a house everywhere, because, from what Richie had gathered from celebrity gossip, he was so confident in his ability to consistently produce horror novels that he wasn’t worried about debt. Bill was, it seemed, an inhuman writing machine—he pumped out a hit just about every year, along with short stories and a lot of adaptation consulting.</p><p>Still, Richie was surprised when Bill called him a few days later and said, “I’m gonna be in LA, they’re trying to make another <em> Little Toe </em> feature.” And then he said things that simply did not make sense, but that sounded like complaints, such as, “It’s all internal, dude,” and wrapped up with, “anyway, I’m supposed to consult.” He paused. “Wait, have you read it?” </p><p>“I have absolutely not, Bill,” he said. “I will, though. Sick name.”</p><p>“Don’t. Fucking hate that novel.” And what was Richie supposed to say to that? Everything he knew about <em> Little Toe </em> he’d gotten from pop-culture osmosis, but he knew it involved children cannibalizing each other. Whatever he said about the subject would seem like an extension of his own experience feeding on Bill and Eddie and everyone else.</p><p>“You are literally a cliche,” Richie said instead. “Like, who says, out loud, that they hate their old work?” This was probably too mean, but Bill did a throat-clearing half-chuckle anyway. Richie imagined the wax animatronic expression he was probably making and realized he didn’t have enough memories of Bill’s adult face to really know what it would look like. Richie tried to tell if he was upset. Probably, but not about being a cliche. He’d been laughing in that hollowed-out medical way since Georgie, and back then it had usually meant that he was thinking about either violence or secrets. Really, he was a pretty disconcerting guy. </p><p>“Everyone, Rich,” Bill said, after a while. “You say it all the time. We were fighting the clown and you confessed that you didn’t like your sets.”</p><p>“I said I didn’t <em> write </em> my sets! They aren’t my old work, they’re a team’s old work.”</p><p>“Whatever,” Bill said. </p><p>The thing was, Richie didn’t mind disconcerting. He was pretty hard to disconcert, and, anyway, there was something he had to talk to Bill about. “You want to get drinks in LA?” he asked. “Given that I live here and shit.” </p><p>“Sure,” Bill said, instead of what Richie had kind of hoped he would say, that being, <em> you live and shit in LA? Of course you shit there, if it’s where you live </em>. He realized this was not a normal joke to set up, but it was the kind Bill had always picked up on when they were kids. Bill never initiated a joke himself, but he was always twisting other people’s words around to make a new one. It was pretty depressing that he’d stopped trying.</p><p>Eddie popped his head out of the guest bedroom/recently designated study. “Rich—” he started, then noticed he was still on the phone, waved, and mouthed something, probably either <em> sorry </em> or <em> tell Bill I say—never mind, don’t! </em>  Mostly, Eddie looked like a fish. Richie tried not to giggle in a transparently in-love way and failed.</p><p>Bill didn’t comment, though. “When are you free?” he asked. “I know an absolute shithole that you are gonna love.” Richie was never not free, which he expressed, so they wound up with plans for eight that Tuesday. </p><p>Only after he arrived did Richie remember that Bill always used to force him to play pool. Richie was totally incapable of looking down a cue with any accuracy—his eyes needed to creakily adjust every time something was a new distance away, which made it pretty impossible, not to mention the most boring thing in the world, to focus on the entirety of the third dimension along a thin stick. The fact that he hadn’t gotten a new prescription in years probably didn’t help, but he liked it when the crowd was as blurry as possible at his shows, so there wasn’t much incentive to change.</p><p>Bill leaned against a wall and, blank-faced, watched Richie absolutely eat shit at setting up a shot. The only people aside from R and Bill were already passed out on sticky tables. After half-assedly tapped a ball into a corner, Richie turned to Bill and said, “Dude, can you please explain why you’re looking at me like a Klaus Baudelaire funko pop?” </p><p>Bill laughed like a coughing fit. It was an ugly, loud burst of haw-haw that contained several expressions, including utter bereavement, terror, and oh-god-Richie’s-doing-it-again, which was its own discrete emotion. “What the fuck, Richie, that’s just my face. Why do you look like—” and Bill only had to pause for a second before finishing, “like one of those ovarian cysts that grows teeth?” </p><p>“Why do you look like reconstituted Elijah Wood?”</p><p>Bill’s face was more open, now, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth in a vain attempt to suppress a startled, horse giggle. Mostly, though, he looked tired. “Why do you look like stubbly egg whites?” </p><p>“Why do you laugh like heterosexual Pinocchio with a tracheotomy?” Bill actually grinned at that one, and did another mucousy braying facsimile of how real boys laugh. </p><p>Bill loosened up a bit, after that, and Richie was able to steer him away from the billiards and toward a corner table. Richie wondered briefly if adult Bill still drank like a passively suicidal sorority sister, but determined that he probably didn’t. He’d calmed down a little already by the time they were 18, and he’d been pretty un-wasted when they came back to Derry. Now he kept ordering boilermakers and mixing the shot with the beer, which Richie didn’t realize anyone outside of maybe coal-miners actually did. “You drink like a coal-miner,” he told Bill. Bill’s mom had been an elementary school teacher, his dad an electrician, so this wasn’t the kind of thing that offended Bill. He didn’t respond much, though, just shrugged with one shoulder and took a long swallow. </p><p>Richie realized, then, that Bill was a lot drunker than he’d realized.  Usually, when Bill spoke, you could tell everything was coming out in a predetermined order. This was what made him the most St.-Crispin’s-Day-speech motherfucker Richie had met in his life, even when they were kids. It was only when he drank that things started coming out in a sequence more similar to how a normal human being might think them.</p><p>Then Bill said, “I think I’m getting divorced,” which absolutely proved it: he was drunk.</p><p>“Shit,” Richie said. “Seriously?”</p><p>Bill didn’t tell Richie, <em> no, not fucking seriously. Yes, seriously, Richie </em>. “Uh huh,” he said instead.</p><p>“I’m really fucking sorry, man,” Richie said, then, after a pause, “Are you gonna, like—”</p><p>“Hold on,” Bill said, and got up to order another drink. He came back, sat down hard, and said, suddenly, “I miss him. I didn’t used to miss him this much.” Richie realized that he was talking about Georgie. “I wish I forgot—” He broke off, but Richie could pretty much fill in the blanks of what, exactly, Bill might not want to remember.</p><p>Richie was grateful for not having lost his memories, now, even the worst ones. Despite the fact that he occasionally heard Eddie snoring as Bowers’s near-silent last wheeze, and that he cried all the fucking time, and that his hands sweated and shook, he was glad. He used to not be a person, and now he was one; sometimes this sucked, but it had its rewards. It wasn’t like that for Bill, though. Richie got Eddie back, Eddie got his incredible self back, Bev and Mike were freer and less alone, and Ben didn’t gain anything in Derry, but he didn’t lose as much as Bill. Bill came away with so much less than he’d went in. He left Derry at forty with the knowledge that his brother had been <em> eaten </em>, and slowly. When Richie was first remembering, he had tried to Google how long a seven-year-old child could survive without an arm, hoping it wasn’t long. He found himself with no answers and retching with the mindless cold truth that, whatever answer he found, Georgie had suffered for the same amount of time, and that there was nothing at all he could do. Richie couldn’t imagine how Bill must have reacted. How he still must feel. </p><p>Some of what they lost in Derry, the first time around and the second, wouldn’t grow back. For Bill, it had been Georgie. Richie assumed that Bill had grieved his brother in a normal capacity, in the twenty years that they were gone, had wondered if Georgie was in heaven or if he and everyone else only existed as firing neurons. But now, Bill had to re-grieve abnormally, because what happened to Georgie did not allow for those kinds of questions. It had provoked different ones in Bill, back then: “What does the clown eat, if not the body?”, he’d once asked Richie, shuddering, scraping the pads of his fingers up and down the rough white stucco beside the Derry public pool until they left bloody trails. And, years later, standing on the edge of Bobby Miller’s roof at a party, where Richie had broken a punch bowl and then climbed up the ladder to find Bill: “How do you think a soul gets digested?” </p><p>Richie tried to talk him down from that. Upon failing, he climbed blind drunk and skittering across the damp slick slate of the roof, and said, “Don’t know what you’re thinking here, but, FYI, I will lemming your ass if you try any shit.” Bill had said, “I’m not gonna fucking leap, asshole. You’re the one who always has to make everyone look at you. Jesus.” And he probably wouldn’t have. But Bill was fucked up in a messiah-complex way that made him difficult for Stan to mother-hen, and Mike wasn’t allowed to go to parties when he had to work in the mornings, which left Richie as de facto best friend, de facto protector-from-evil.</p><p>Richie had never been great at protecting anyone from evil, even—especially—his own. He was a black hole of need, and then he was a prick—usually in that order, but sometimes both at once. If he let himself take at all, he took too much, and he was always taking too much: crying on shoulders, asking strangers in club bathrooms to choke him, never following through or paying back. It didn’t feel like something he could turn off, the taking, it felt like a need—but everything felt like a need, to Richie, being looked at and being high and being wanted. He asked in abject, erratic bursts, and he either received or went insane, in horrible faggy-shorts breakdowns. Generally, people got out when they saw the way the wind was blowing, or they plugged their ears and shut their eyes until Richie had to pull the plug himself, out of the closest thing he got, in those twenty years, to mercy. He didn’t want to pull the plug now, though, so he was trying a lot harder. He was trying not to push Eddie, and he was trying not to be too much of a dick to Stan, and he was trying not to ignore Bev when she was being manic on the same annoying frequency as Richie himself got. Because Richie loved them, but also because Richie’s sad little psyche got lonely taking a longer-than-average shit, and he’d felt utterly alone for the last two decades, and actually been utterly alone for at least eight years. He’d do anything to prevent it from happening again.</p><p>Now, Richie said, “Yeah, man.” There wasn’t much else to say—what was he going to tell Bill, that he should be glad he remembered?—but he had to say something, because Bill needed to hear something. He caught Bill’s eye and lied, “you’re gonna be a good dad.”</p><p>Bill had been using the same small smile and unfocused toilet-bowl-cleaner stare to shut people down since they were kids, and now he turned it on Richie. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Not a great husband.”</p><p>“You were a good brother, though,” Richie said, which was a bad move. Every time he tried to be sincere, really, it ended badly. </p><p>Bill shook his head, low, like an alligator tearing pieces of flesh from a hippo or a Floridian, and said, “don’t.”</p><p>“Shit lay, though, apparently,” Richie offered. Bill looked kind of panicked, so maybe he <em> was </em> terrible at sex and thought Richie had been talking to Michelle Pfeiffer or something. “Bev said your butthole is full of teeth.”</p><p>“Oh, god.” Bill said. And then, “wait, what?”</p><p>“Yeah, she tried to flip me off and her finger fell off.”</p><p>Bill laughed. “Okay, so, in this hypothetical—“</p><p>“The hypothetical where you have an anus dentata? You wanna go into that?”</p><p>“You brought it up. Anyway, what you’re saying is that my ass bit off most of her finger, but it stayed attached until she extended it? Are you saying my butt-teeth are so dull that they just mangled it and broke the bone, or what?” </p><p>Bill was truly fucking psychotic. Thinking about the logistics of something like Bev's middle finger falling off probably made him good at his job, but it also really made it sound like he had an ass full of very sharp teeth and wanted to defend its ability to bite through bone in one go. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, Bill. I’m insulting the deadliness of your pooper.” </p><p>Bill laughed. He looked relaxed enough for Richie to ask, “Have you talked to Bev recently?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Bill said, instead of <em> no, I won’t talk to her because we had sex, </em>because nothing could ever be easy. “I mean, a little.”</p><p>“Okay, I’m not gonna bullshit you. I know you haven’t, ’cause I talked to her, and she misses you and shit.”</p><p>Bill grimaced. “Yeah, sure, okay,” he said. “I like Bev, I really do.” He cleared what sounded like a quart of Flubber from his throat and added, “she’s great.” </p><p>There had always been something weird going on with Bill and Bev, especially from Bill’s direction, and Richie’d never understood what, exactly, it was. Maybe it had to do with the fact that they were the only two Losers who truly did not care if they lived or died. “She’s an asshole,” Richie said. </p><p>Bill grabbed Richie’s beer and stole what at first appeared to be a sip, but then he didn’t let go, and Richie began to doubt he’d give it back. “So, she and Mikey?” he said. “They’ll be good for each other.” </p><p>“I don’t think that’s happening, dude.” </p><p>Bill scoffed. “She and Ben happened.” </p><p>Richie pushed a hand under his glasses. “Okay, but like—I know you’re not doing this, obviously, but you know how she’s sensitive about people calling her a whore? Just. I dunno, like, I think she wants people to stay away from,” and Richie did a relatively kind imitation of Bill, “<em> Beverly is a syphilitic floozy.”  </em></p><p>“Jesus, Rich, I just asked if she was with Mike. Being with Mike isn’t a fucking bad thing. I don’t think she’s a—and you’re the one who called her a syphilitic floozy!”</p><p>“Affectionately, though.” Bill glared at him, drunkenly enraged. “Okay, whatever,” Richie amended, because there was no winning the correct-ways-to-call-Beverly-a-hussy battle, and his general message seemed to be sinking in anyway. “You should call her, dude. She actually gives a shit about you, you know? And she and Mike are, like, at war. She keeps buying really fucked up ceramics.”</p><p>Bill almost, but didn’t quite, crack a smile. “Yeah, I saw the ceramics. Mike showed me,” he said. “I’ll call her.” He ordered four more shots, and took two at once. </p><p>“Christ almighty,” Richie said. </p><p>Bill ran into the corner of a table, said <em> fucking shit! </em>, and kicked it. The bartender told him not to kick his tables, please, and offered him water, which he spilled down his front in increments over the course of the next hour. By 10, Bill was falling asleep for brief periods of time, hunched over on himself, until his head hung too far forward and he woke up with a snort. Richie thought he should probably drive Bill home.</p><p>Richie had just finished maneuvering Bill into the passenger side of a very obnoxious Tesla and was in the process of backing the driver’s seat up enough that he would fit in when Bill turned to him and said, inexplicably, “Not just a husband.” Then he clarified, “I’ve been a terrible friend, too.”</p><p>“Yeah. You should really talk to Bev,” Richie said, finally squeezing into the seat, where he was confronted with a bafflingly vast array of driver’s controls. He started a desperate search for the parking brake. “She misses you and shit.”</p><p>“I mean, to you,” Bill said. “I’ve never given you anything.”</p><p>“Well, we killed a demon clown,” Richie said, finally locating the gear shift and glancing up at Bill. He was doing the toilet-bowl-cleaner stare again, but worse this time. “That kind of counts.”</p><p>“I didn’t do that for <em> you </em>, though,” Bill said. “I’ve never done anything for you.” He leaned over a little. “What can I do, Richie? Anything.”</p><p>“Dude, don’t worry about it,” Richie said. “Seriously, it’s not a big deal.” And it wasn’t. Richie still wasn’t a great protector from evil, but he was trying to learn, and part of the job was that you didn’t take anything in exchange.</p><p>Like he hadn’t even heard him, though, Bill muttered, distantly, “I’m gonna make it up to you, Richie,” which was a little bit terrifying. But Richie was distracted by trying to figure out how to drive Bill’s stupid celebritymobile—it kept beeping—and didn’t think too hard about it.</p><p>When Richie got back to the apartment, Eddie wasn’t in the living room. “Eds?” he called.</p><p>“In here!” Eddie said. Richie followed his voice to the bathroom, where Eddie was wielding something that looked vaguely like a weapon in <em> Blade Runner </em>. There was a metal cord connecting it to the shower drain. “I’m snaking the drain,” he told Richie, and then, with an awful, grating sound, yanked the cord. A thick wad of hair emerged.</p><p>“Dude, what the fuck?” Richie said. “Did it get clogged?”</p><p>“Not really,” Eddie said. He wasn’t wearing his pajamas; instead, he was in a pair of Richie’s sweatpants, the waistband of which he’d had to roll to keep them on his hips, and a Black Flag shirt that dwarfed him. “I was just taking a shower, and—you know. I needed to know what was down there.”</p><p>“Okay, I don’t, like, know,” Richie said. “I’ve never had that impulse. But, I mean, thanks.”</p><p>“I had to <em> know, </em>” Eddie said again. “If I didn’t find out for sure, I’d just keep thinking about how anything could be down there. Just lurking right under my feet, all this disgusting stuff.” He pushed his hair, which had come spikily ungelled, out of his face with a forearm. “A rat king or something.”</p><p>“Did you find one?”</p><p>“Nope.” Eddie straightened and wiped his hands on the sweatpants. “How was it?” he asked, and stepped around Richie. “There’s Drano in there,” he informed him as he walked into the kitchen and started washing his hands. “Stay out of that sink for a couple hours or your skin might dissolve.” He started drying his hands and turned back to Richie. “Anyway. You were saying.”</p><p>“Uh, let’s see,” Richie said, perching creakily on the barstool Eddie fixed. “It was fine. I think? Bill got wasted, but I think he’s gonna call Bev. I drove a Tesla!”</p><p>Eddie looked incredulous. “Bill has a Tesla?”</p><p>“Yeah, and I had to drive it to Bel Air,” Richie said. “Oh, worse news than the Tesla: he and Audra are splitting up.”</p><p>“Jesus,” Eddie said, leaning his palms against the counter. “What about the kid?”</p><p>“I don’t know, man. Bill’s pretty fucked up.” Richie paused. “Probably more about the kid than Audra.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Fuck.” He came around the island and stood between Richie’s knees, a hand on each of his thighs. “I’m sorry, Richie,” he said. “I wish—I don’t know. I want to see him, too. With you. I just.”</p><p>“Don’t worry about it,” Richie said. “Seriously, man. No pressure.”</p><p>“It’s kind of unfair, though,” Eddie said. His jaw shifted. “You having to lie. I really—I hate doing that to you.”</p><p>“You aren’t <em> doing </em>anything to me,” Richie said. “You don’t owe me shit, Eds.”</p><p>Eddie made a weird face for a second, and Richie thought he was going to push him—on what, Richie had no idea, because Richie was pretty objectively correct—but then he just sighed. “Well, I don’t know about that,” Eddie said, “but this is ridiculous. This is like sneaking around in Stan’s basement. It seems crazy.”</p><p>Richie shrugged. “It’s not that bad,” he said, then, desperate to deflect from the question of whether he wanted Eddie to come out, he asked, “hey, Eds, do you think my friendship with Stan was just an extension of my rampant daddy issues?”</p><p>Displays of annoying self-obsession usually did the trick in distracting Eddie, and this was no different. He rolled his eyes at Richie. “I should hope not,” he said. “Anyway, it isn’t anymore. You could buy his house out from under him.”</p><p>Richie winked. “Under, huh?”</p><p>“That doesn’t make any sense,” Eddie said. It did, though, in a somewhat thematic way—Richie got a mild sexual thrill from the basic concept of <em> under </em> , probably because he was a big guy and he’d never had anything real to fear from being <em> under </em>, just from the supernatural and being seen for what he was. Also, frankly, he scared himself a little bit—his explosions of desperate rage and fear and self-destruction were not a lot of fucking fun, especially afterwards, and it was harder to explode while pinned down.</p><p>“Okay, well, how about Rabbi Uris?” he said.</p><p>Eddie leaned back against the counter and leveled Richie with a look of profound disappointment. “The man was a <em> rabbi, </em>oh my god.”</p><p>“So, what, is that a yes?”</p><p>“No! It is a no,” he said. “<em> But </em>…”</p><p>“Wait, so were <em> you </em>thinking about Rabbi Uris like—”</p><p>“<em> What </em>is wrong with you,” Eddie said. “For the record, no. But, you know, you could put something about all that in a set.”</p><p>That wasn’t a bad idea, actually. “Hey, good point,” he told Eddie, who grinned with dimples. “You mean the thing about daddy issues?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Or, I don’t know. You did some pretty weird shit to your dad.”</p><p>“What weird shit did I do to Wentworth?”</p><p>Eddie crossed his arms. “You need me to tell you what <em> you </em> did to <em> your </em>dad? Come on.”</p><p>“I do! I’m sorry you have to see me like this, Edward, but it is what it is. My brain is Swiss cheese,” Richie said. “Like, I know the clown magic got you too, but I also did so many poppers at such a fragile age, which you didn’t.”</p><p>“Uh huh,” Eddie said, laughing. “Okay, seriously. You got any good jokes about your dad for me?”</p><p>“Jesus, fine,” Richie said. “Okay. I have a really bad one.”</p><p>“Yeah?”</p><p>“Me and my sisters, we used to call him Wentworthless.”</p><p>“<em> God </em>.”</p><p>“I know,” Richie said. “Poor fucking guy. I don’t know how he survived my adolescence, honestly. I never called him Wentworthless to his face, though. Just behind his back.”</p><p>“He must be really grateful.”</p><p>“You know, I’m not sure he is. I think he could’ve handled Wentworthless thrown at him directly, but slowly poisoning the town well with it? How was he supposed to deal with that?”</p><p>“There was that time he called me <em> son </em>,” Eddie said. “I never figured out what was going on there. Did he know we were together?”</p><p>“He definitely knew I was gay, and to be totally honest, he might have known we were making Rich-kabobs—”</p><p>“Gross, Richie!” Eddie said, which was evidence that Richie had successfully distracted him from the actual implications of Richie’s relationship with his father, namely the fact that Eddie might eventually have to talk to Wentworth again after all these years. Richie’d called him again, after that first time, and it had been pretty awkward, but not terrible. Wentworth had lectured Richie about whiskey for eight straight minutes (Richie had checked), then asked him if he had a primary care provider. “That’s—how did you even come up with that?” Eddie continued. “You can’t go from saying no cherries were popped to claiming I was roasting you on a skewer.”</p><p>“Sorry! I’m an unreliable guy!” </p><p>Eddie rolled his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “So unreliable you remembered what brand of protein powder I like.”</p><p>“I only remembered that because it’s funny,” Richie said. “The fact that you eat that is really hilariously funny.”</p><p>“I don’t eat it,” Eddie said. “I drink it. You can’t eat a powder.”</p><p>Richie tried to think of a counterpoint. “You could rub it into your gums,” he said, and demonstrated, pulling his lip down running a finger along the inner seam.</p><p>Eddie’s eyes got wide, his eyebrows flattening. “You know exactly what you’re doing,” he said.</p><p>“Hey,” Richie told him, “it works.”</p><p>“Does it?” Eddie asked. “You need a new move.”</p><p>“I don’t know if I <em> need </em> a new move, if this one does the job.”</p><p>“I asked you if it did, and I didn’t actually hear a compelling argument.”</p><p>“I can see your boner, dude,” Richie said. “I know your secret now. Your deep, dark, mucosal secret.”</p><p>“<em> When </em> will you stop bringing that up?” Richie laughed, delighted, and Eddie rolled his eyes “Also, I don’t have a boner,” he said, and then eyed his own crotch dubiously. “I have maybe a shadow of a boner, so I am never wearing these pants again. These are just boner pants.”</p><p>“All pants are boner pants when I’m around,” Richie said. Eddie hummed, then grabbed Richie’s hand and kissed it like he was a debutante.</p><p>Richie still felt a jolt of shock when Eddie was so easily affectionate, when he squeezed Richie’s thigh or slung an arm around him, when he kissed him on the corner of the mouth and scrunched a hand in the back of his hair. No one had ever touched Richie so much unprovoked, at least by some exaggerated show of sexiness on Richie’s part. Eddie, in particular, never touched Richie unprovoked when they were kids; Richie always had to drive him to the point of contact, often dickishly. He sort of thought that whatever was now compelling Eddie to scoot in close and manhandle Richie’s limbs around was a limited resource, that it would run out and Eddie would come to his senses. Not that Eddie wouldn’t love him—that was another issue—but that he just wouldn’t want him so much. That would be okay, Richie reasoned. Eddie knew he could have as much of Richie as he wanted, whenever he wanted it; the idea of him knowing this and choosing not to take it was devastatingly humiliating, but also kind of sexy, so Richie’d probably be able to work with it when it came to pass.</p><p>He’d always been able to work with Eddie’s disgust, after all, because it had been kind of sexy, too, at the time. It had been proximity, at least. Back in high school, when Richie shocked and horrified Eddie, the person Eddie was recoiling from was sometimes a joke, sure, but sometimes it was the real deal, the real Richie. Richie’d wanted even Eddie’s most genuine and deep-cutting <em> get the fuck away from me </em>s, back then, because being with Eddie was the only time the real Richie got to move around and stretch his legs at all. He’d wanted to be seen through, even if Eddie didn’t like what he saw. The times he did like what he saw, against all reason, were some of the brightest spots in Richie’s shitshow of an adolescence.</p><p>Eddie was the most beautiful, clear water Richie had ever encountered, bracing and unadulterated. He was like one of the freezing streams in Derry, which just seemed not to exist in California. He’d gotten good grades and ran fast, did everything normal people did to make up for being sort of brainless and uninteresting without for one second being actually brainless and uninteresting, and now he had a real job and a life that didn’t depend entirely on public opinion. Everything he had, he’d earned, including Richie. Richie, who had never really worked a day in his life and just sort of happened upon shit by chance, had to earn <em>him</em>, somehow, now. Richie had always fucked up earning things, and now the stakes were so goddamn high.</p><p>He’d spent his whole life either lying or being an asshole, usually both. Now he didn’t want to be an asshole, and he couldn’t lie, at least to Eddie, not since he’d walked in on Richie crying to “Nightswimming.” Richie’s brand was fucking ruined, every part of it either poisoned or decayed, and all Richie had in its place was his underdeveloped ability to refrain from fucking up. He could try to be a good guy, or at least an adult, and with other people—Bill, for example—it sometimes felt like a reasonable, if not perfect, replacement for the idiotic personae he used to put on before. With Eddie, though, this worked in the inverse. Richie was trying so hard to be good for him, and the harder he tried the more obvious he got. If Eddie recoiled from him now, if he ended up not liking what he saw, he wouldn’t be recoiling from Richie’s worst-case-scenario teenage bullshit. He’d be recoiling from the best effort Richie was ever likely to make. Richie had put every card he had down at the beginning, and Eddie could see every new one he drew. He had Richie totally at his mercy.</p><p>Eddie had a hand on Richie’s face now. “You good?” he asked.</p><p>Eddie was a good guy, a real adult, and he still wanted Richie now, at least, against all odds. Being at his mercy wasn’t such a bad thing. Richie forced himself to relax his face. “Uh huh,” he said, and reached out to pull Eddie closer.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>there is some discussion of the horrible things that happened to bill in it ch. 1 here, including some moderately graphic detail about georgie’s death</p><p>in other news—if you commented on the last chapter, thank you so, so much. sorry we haven’t gotten to a lot of them, but we appreciate them all more than we can say and will respond eventually</p><p>genius insight into richie’s bowling alley escapades c/o “maybe when the summer ends” by charactershoes, a really fantastic fic</p><p>also, <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund">FANG collective’s community bail fund </a> is doing good work right now.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>once again, this is the shirt https://66.media.tumblr.com/b4437043faa6c5d3ba67a71443ebfb78/tumblr_nhh2zhjOnW1qz9uino1_500.jpg</p></blockquote></div></div>
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